My Vera Lite finally died so I decided to try running Z-Wave directly under HA. The main device I’m interested in working with is a (very old) Trane TZEMT400BB32 Thermostat. I’m using a Zooz 800 ZST39 LR USB stick.
The problem I’m having is that while I can control the thermostat, none of the current state is coming back. I’m seeing timeout messages during the interview as well. I’m assuming there is probably a protocol issue because it’s so old. Is there anything I can do in ZWaveJS UI to debug this? Is the thermostat just too old to work in a modern installation?
It probably requires polling if it’s that old. Look up how to setup polling for a device in JSUI docs and don’t overdo it. ZWave networks are low speed and low bandwidth. Constant polling will cause issues. So you’ll have to balance your updates against network performance.
Welcome to old school ZWave.
Thanks for that, polling does seem to help. In addition, several more values showed up overnight. I think I have some connectivity issues to sort out. I suspect these were making it slow to pick up all the values provided by the thermostat.
Bottom line for what I needed to do: wait longer for all the values to show up and try to increase signal quality. The many timeouts I was seeing during the interview appear to be benign. The thermostat is now working as expected, although it is still occasionally being marked as dead, presumably due to signal issues.
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