Z-Wave Network Repair / Routes

Oh I already did! I replaced everything zwave I could with Zigbee, and you’d be surprised what you can find or build. All that’s left are my GE fan controllers, HEM, water meter, and a few Minimotes (soon to go away too).

Ever since I converted to Zigbee I’ve not had a single problem, and my ST environment is rock solid and way faster than ever before. If I knew then what I know now, I would have started with Zigbee and limited my investment with Zwave to be honest.

While I can’t find the information that I saw right now, I believe Jasco is about to release a zigbee fan controller.

What remotes have you adopted? I want to get rid of my minimotes but have not found something 100% comparable.

I’ve seen your comments before and you have inspired me to expand my zigbee network, tearing down part of the zwave network. I am happy with the results to date.

Wholly cow, that would be outstanding!

I’m waiting for a couple IKEA remotes to try (Products - IKEA). I know they’ll work with ST, but it’s the WAF that will determine if those will work. My wife really likes the numbered button vs what IKEA has on their remotes, so we’ll see.

:+1:

Thanks! How did you determine that you had a dead device? All my devices work, I just have unpredictable slowdowns.

All the Z-wave devices I have so far are smart switches and dimmers. Mostly Zooz with a few Leviton and one GE/Jasco. All are Z-wave plus.

The heart of my house is a 22ft x 50ft space which incorporates the kitchen, dining room, wet bar, and living room. Leading out of it are three hallways, the front entry, and multiple glass sliding doors to the porch and patio.

There are 30 switches at various points around this one room that operate a large number of interior and exterior lights. Out of my 23 Z-wave devices, 19 are in this one space. I’ve also got 2 GE Zigbee devices (a switch and a dimmer).

All the Z-wave repair errors I get involve the devices in this one room. I’ve looked at the routes and they are nonsensical. Devices in the same multi-gang box will route in completely opposite directions. See this thread:

I see the slow responses when triggering scenes, either via the new, STSC app or via Alexa. What I usually see is instant response for most devices in the scene, with a 30 to 60 second delay on one or two random devices.

I don’t use WebCore, what Automations I have are in Smart Lighting or the new STSC Automations.

I’ve lamented about this before including on a thread I started here:

Would love to figure this out.

How many of the Zooz devices are energy reporting? While I really like the Zooz products due to the numerous features they tend to have, I have suspected them in several cases of generating too much traffic. I would try to turn off all energy reporting on all devices to see if it helps. I would not expect too much traffic with 23 devices, but it may be possible if they are all energy reporting and set to send reports too frequently.

Hey All,

I just wanted to say that I appreciate the feedback. There are clearly areas that we need to improve and help.

Currently, the Z-Wave routes are refreshed every 24 hours, or when a device is added or removed. We are going to also refresh the routes once a network repair is completed (That will be available in 0.31.X).

We are also looking at providing the transmission error rate in 0.32.X release.

Honestly, it is very difficult to debug many of these issues that you guys report without being present in the environment to debug the over the air network traffic. But our team is here to help.

@aruffell I noticed that you have some Z-Wave S2 devices (networkSecurityLevel marked as “ZWAVE_S2_FAILED”) that you have not connected with using S2 security, so I have gone ahead and enabled Z-Wave S2 for your account. Please go ahead, exclude them and re-include them again. S2 will not only add enhanced security but also reduce network traffic for communication with those devices. We are currently in the progress of rolling out the functionality, about 20-40% of our users have S2 enabled (The complete roll out will be completed by two weeks hopefully).

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Is there a way to know when it is enabled so people can start excluding/including devices?

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Can you define “refresh routes”? Is it the updating of routes in the hub’s table or on the devices? I believe the network repair updates the table on the hub and tries to update the route on the devices as well, but, as in my case, it sometimes fails to do so as I believe my errors show. Are you saying that the hub will try to refresh the routes on the devices with the cadence you mentioned to mitigate this issue? Either way - AWESOME!

AWESOME! This helps us troubleshoot what is causing issues on the network! And less ST blaming as a result :wink: :slight_smile:

AWESOME! As far as I know, the majority of my Zwave devices are Zwave Plus and S2 compliant. The majority of my Zwave devices are Homeseer dimmers, switches and fan controllers (Zwave plus S2 Wx-200 series). I also have a number of Zooz devices that I believe also support S2. Lots of work for me ahead… fingers crossed.

EDIT: Now I am very glad I kept the QR code on the device packaging since I would have to remove the clip on wall plate and the underlying screwed on plate for every single one…

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Do you have to have the QR code to securely include? I do not know if I have all the QR codes? I think one of the devices had the QR code in the box or something.

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In my case the QR code was on both the box and the device itself (on the yolk). My wall plates are clip on and have another plate underneath that is screwed on so having kept the QR codes on the boxes, I can skip the disassembly.

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Can I borrow this picture for my album cover?

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Apologies, I forget that internal terms are not as well documented for external folks.
But yes, “refresh routes” is essentially pulling the routes for a given device and pushing it to our cloud which can be viewed through IDE.

The reason we update the routes slowly is because we do not want to increase the cloud load, we are working on something so we can give the user the ability to request routes at will.

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None of my Zooz ZEN27 or ZEN26 devices report energy usage.

LOL, Sure!

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@Kianoosh_Karami - Thank you for enabling S2 on my hub. In my quest to optimize (aka lower network traffic) my system I decided to exclude and re-include devices so that they are S2 authenticated. I have only done a handful and am having a dreadful experience. Pretty much all of the dimmers and fan controllers I’ve done to now required many attempts and took a very long time.

I am using a Samsung S20 5g Ultra running Android 10’s latest security patch. Everything on the phone is up to date. I disabled Adguard, and my Pi Holes just in case. IPS and IDS on my Unifi networking gear is disabled but GeoIP blocking, I believe, is still active (however I have blocked some countries that should be unlikely matter to ST services).

The first hurdle is the awful and slow focusing of the S20 (I have to say the Note 8 was nearly the same) that struggles to focus on the QR code. Once that is done, it starts searching and tells me to prepare the device. When the LED blinks on the hub (I had it right next to the devices each time after the first failures) I tapped once on the Homeseer WD200+ dimmer (I tried 1, 2 or 3 taps even though the instructions say 1, and I tried re-tapping after a lengthy wait just in case to account for delays in the process).

In a minority of the attempts I get a second request for the QR (why again?) code and that usually means it worked, but I’ve had a number of cases where that resulted in the device being added but not securely (according to the app). I am then presented with the option to exclude or exit.

In other cases I just abort as it sits at 30% for way too long.

I’ve also had the ST app freeze up on me while trying to back out as nothing is happening.

I have air-gapped the device, I have reset it via the 3 up and 3 down taps method, and I have excluded it with both the classic and new app. By the way… it is so much easier to get to the exclude option in the old app that I cringe to go hunting for my hub in the new app.

I believe you told me in a few similar, but not S2 related cases, that something was timing out before it could complete (NIF not sent fast enough?). It’s been years of this so all I can do is cut back on my Zwave devices… but is it possible this issue is so uncommon that it doesn’t get addressed?

A snippet of my logs while I was trying to include the last device I did. I lost… It is not included as it just won’t work.

Any tips?

2020-04-14 6:05:21.674 PM CDT
17 minutes ago    HUB   ping  ping    ping   
2020-04-14 6:04:37.023 PM CDT
17 minutes ago    HUB     Z-Wave device [9F]: Not respo...    Z-Wave device [9F]: Not responding   
2020-04-14 6:04:10.076 PM CDT
18 minutes ago    HUB     Z-Wave device [21]: Not respo...    Z-Wave device [21]: Not responding   
2020-04-14 6:03:26.875 PM CDT
19 minutes ago    HUB   zwStatus  ready    Z-Wave device configuration finished   
2020-04-14 6:03:19.034 PM CDT
19 minutes ago    HUB   deviceUpdate  deviceUpdate    HomeSeer WD200+ Dimmer - Modified 2 updated   
2020-04-14 6:03:18.488 PM CDT
19 minutes ago    HUB   deviceAdd  deviceAdd    HomeSeer WD200+ Dimmer - Modified 2 added   
2020-04-14 6:03:16.932 PM CDT
19 minutes ago    HUB   zwStatus  device configuration    Z-Wave device configuration started   
2020-04-14 6:03:16.888 PM CDT
19 minutes ago    HUB   zwjoin  4B    zw:L type:1101 mfr:000C prod:4447 model:3036 ver:5.14 zwv:4.61 lib:03 cc:5E,86,85,59,55,72,5A,73,26,27,70,5B,2C,2B,9F,6C,7A cc...   
2020-04-14 6:03:12.887 PM CDT
19 minutes ago    HUB   zwStatus  device setup    Z-Wave device setup started   
2020-04-14 6:03:12.841 PM CDT
19 minutes ago    HUB   zwStatus  device inclusion    Z-Wave device inclusion started   
2020-04-14 6:02:33.817 PM CDT
19 minutes ago    HUB   zwStatus  include search    Z-Wave include search started   
2020-04-14 6:02:11.706 PM CDT
20 minutes ago    HUB   zwStatus  ready    Z-Wave exclude search ended   
2020-04-14 6:02:09.594 PM CDT
20 minutes ago    HUB   zwStatus  exclude search    Z-Wave exclude search started   
2020-04-14 6:02:08.371 PM CDT
20 minutes ago    HUB   zw removed device: 00  zw removed device: 00    zw removed device: 00   
2020-04-14 6:02:08.350 PM CDT
20 minutes ago    HUB   zwStatus  device exclusion    Z-Wave device exclusion started   
2020-04-14 6:02:08.347 PM CDT
20 minutes ago    HUB   zwStatus  ready    Z-Wave device exclusion finished   
2020-04-14 6:02:06.540 PM CDT
20 minutes ago    HUB   zwStatus  exclude search    Z-Wave exclude search started   
2020-04-14 6:02:05.643 PM CDT
20 minutes ago    HUB   zwStatus  device exclusion    Z-Wave device exclusion started   
2020-04-14 6:02:04.752 PM CDT
20 minutes ago    HUB   zwStatus  ready    Z-Wave device exclusion finished   
2020-04-14 6:02:04.742 PM CDT
20 minutes ago    HUB   zw removed device: 49  zw removed device: 49    zw removed device: 49   
2020-04-14 6:01:57.592 PM CDT
20 minutes ago    HUB   zwStatus  exclude search    Z-Wave exclude search started   
2020-04-14 6:01:54.474 PM CDT
20 minutes ago    HUB   zwStatus  ready    Z-Wave device configuration finished   
2020-04-14 6:01:47.416 PM CDT
20 minutes ago    HUB   deviceUpdate  deviceUpdate    HomeSeer WD200+ Dimmer - Modified 2 updated   
2020-04-14 6:01:46.817 PM CDT
20 minutes ago    HUB   deviceAdd  deviceAdd    HomeSeer WD200+ Dimmer - Modified 2 added   
2020-04-14 6:01:44.528 PM CDT
20 minutes ago    HUB   zwStatus  device configuration    Z-Wave device configuration started

Let me take a look at your hub logs and see what I can find.

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I forgot to mention that in a few cases, after a successful secure inclusion, the app would report finding 2 or 3 devices of which 1 was the one I just included and the others were all failed previous attempts. This happened at least 3 times that I can recall. The botched inclusions appeared as “On” but were unresponsive. I believe the IDE showed them as active even though they were not. I deleted a few from the IDE and others using the old ST app (just easier to find stuff).

Also, please note that I have 23 ‘rooms’ even though the new app forces a max of 20 (why???). I believe, but it may be pure chance, that one successful inclusion was when I left the default room instead of picking the right one. Any chance that it fails when the room number is ‘out of bounds’?

I will ask our internal support to see if they have any thought about this. This appears that the previously added devices were not configured by the mobile app (this is the step that new devices are shown to the user), so in the later time, it was shown. Let me see what I find.

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@aruffell I will advice that I think the best solution would be to reduce number of rooms to be under the 20 limit. I understand this is frustrating, but this is a current limitation that we have.

@aruffell are you starting the pairing processing by scanning the QR code via the search bar or. Y choosing the z-wave brand from the brand list? I seem to remember having an issue when I I started with the search bar QR code.