New to the forum, not new to ST. I’ve had a Hub V2 in my house since mid-2017. Every light switch in my house is GE Z-Wave toggle (no dimmer), and I have several GE Plug-in Z-Wave appliance switches, along with three Schlage Z-Wave locks and some GE Z-wave door sensors.
A couple of weeks ago, about half the devices in my house stopped responding. Logging in to the IDE showed they were offline. Tried excluding and re-adding, no luck. Then, my hub disappeared from my classic app, though the new app showed it to be connected. The new app showed all of my devices, but not a single one was controllable.
I sent logs to support and generated a ticket on February 24. Several days went by with no answer, so I generated a second ticket. I received ticket creation confirmations for both. Then I saw the emails about outages so I let it lie quietly. I see they showed one issue as “resolved” but neither of my tickets have been responded to! What kind of support is that?
Today, out of a strong desire to get this resolved, I factory reset my hub and began the process of excluding and re-adding my devices, one by one.
NOW here’s the kicker: Out of roughly 49 devices, I could only get 11 to successfully be excluded and re-added. Some would exclude but then would not be found during the “add a thing” process. Some would not exclude. Since the switches are all GE toggle, there is no reset button so I believe the only way to reset is to exclude.
I’m sure that’s very frustrating. There have been lots of complaints about slow response from support since about Black Friday. So not much more I can say about that except to know that you are not alone.
As far as the strange behavior, it sounds likely that you have run into an issue that many people have had in the last few months when their smartthings ID is Changed behind the scenes to a Samsung ID and then the system automatically generates a new default location. In the worst cases, which it sounds like you may have run into, the hub gets put in one location and the devices in another and then the app logic doesn’t work anymore.
Take a look at the community created FAQ on this problem (the topic title is a clickable link) and see if any of that seems to apply:
Thank you for the detailed response. I see many similarities between the link you provided and what I was seeing, though I fear I may have crossed into “point of no return” territory. I do see two locations if I log into IDE so I may try to go through the steps to remove the second location. Although it does say not to mess with it, I think I don’t really have much of a choice since I took the nuclear option of a factory reset on the hub.
My focus at this point is to try and figure out why so many of my devices won’t exclude or be found.
If the hub is on one location and the devices are on a different location then the exclude message will not be sent properly. You can try a “general exclude” and that might work.
Yeah, so I guess this is where I got stuck yesterday. I’ll list my process, maybe there’s something I am overlooking
1: In the app, navigate to “general device exclusion” and tap the button to begin
2: press the toggle switch (or button on appliance module)
3: the app would either immediately say an unknown device had been excluded or it would just sit there. If it did not immediately say the device was excluded, it would never see it. For example, I repeated the process, in some cases even from restarting the app. But if it didn’t work once, it wouldn’t work three more times.
With two exceptions, the devices I excluded were able to be rediscovered. Those two; however, excluded just fine but the app is not seeing them. I even cycled the breakers to those rooms just to make certain the switches were operating from a clean start but they’re just stuck in la-la-land or something
So far, that seems to be working. I’ve been able to get several more switches back into the network, but I still have a few that haven’t excluded or been rediscovered. I will circle back to those after I get the rest of the network rebuilt. If the switches just ultimately will not respond, what in the world is left for me to try?
Regardless, I really appreciate everyone’s info, because I am much farther along than I was yesterday.
So, what’s the deal with ST tech support being so slow to respond? I had an issue early in 2018 and they were on it like a monkey on a cupcake. Now not so much. I hope this is not the beginning of the end, but when support starts slipping like that it’s not a good sign in my opinion
My only suggestion is to run z-wave repair. If errors are found, keep repairing until they stop. Then wait 1 day and let your z-wave network build/heal itself and try adding the remaining devices.
As for support, since December they have become extremely slow to respond by email. Calling may get you a faster response if you can get through. If you search the forum, you will find several threads on support or lack there of.
Sounds good. at the end of the day, I only have 8-10 switches and one deadbolt that I couldn’t exclude/discover so I call that a win for today. I’ll pick up the torch again tomorrow
Late in 2018 support was transferred over to Samsung corporate. I don’t know if that’s because the customer base had grown much larger or if that’s because the new app also includes support for their smart televisions and smart appliances. But it happened. That means the first line support is now basically just people reading from Scripts.
Then since Black Friday 2018, there have been multiple reports in the forum of even the scripted responses taking weeks to happen. People get the first auto response that their request was received, and then crickets. Not sure what’s going on there, since it’s now been several months.
