Hi all.
Time for a Z-wave rant. I’m still struggling with my Popp Z-rain, which is the only battery powered Z-wave device I have, the other device is a Fibaro switch and it’s working fine. This Z-rain drives me nuts on Home Assistant. When I ran Domoticz I thought nothing of it.
I’ve had the Z-rain set to wake up every 3 minutes which drained the lithium batteries in under two months. Clearly not the best solution. I changed it to four hours. Now the issue is, after a reboot of the HA, the Z-rain is in the “initializing CacheLoad” state which is expected pending a scheduled transmission from the Z-rain I’ve read. This wouldn’t be a problem if it wasn’t for HAs inability to zero the rain counter when the rain stops. The Z-rain has two counters, “rain amount” and “rain rate”, where rain amount doesn’t go back to zero after the rain stops whereas rain rate does. If I get 6mm rain in under an hour the amount shows 6mm and rate something similar 6mm/h as expected. But when the rain stops the amount stays at 6mm indefinitely while rate drops to 0. I never had this issue with Domoticz and it’s the exact same hardware kit. I’ve been in contact with Popp support and they suggest sending a rain reset value to the Z-rain which I’ve set up as an automation job when the rain amount hasn’t changed for a while, pretty smart I thought. However this only works if the HA can send commands to the Z-rain which it only does when the Z-rain does it’s scheduled call home.
I’m something of a statistics/graphs nerd and having good historical data is something I…desire and I’m at ease with all other sensors, 433mhz and zigbee, reporting to HA but this Z-wave implementation, no.
End rant
Regards
Fredrik
