I unfortunately have a rogue-ish Z-wave device on my network that I want to get rid of. It’s not dead but it’s flooding my network with useless messages causing other devices to struggle. The challenge is that I can’t physically access it currently, so I can’t e.g. press buttons to put it into exclusion mode.
Is there any way from the controller side to force-exclude just that one node?
(Note: to make matters more complicated, I do have a few other nodes on the network that are currently dead, but should not be removed.)
If it’s a battery device, you can just do “Remove failed node” anytime to remove it.
If it’s mains-powered, no. Exclusion requires device interaction and doesn’t target specific nodes.
Some possible options:
Cut power (e.g. at the electrical panel) to the device, then “Remove failed node”
Wrap your USB controller antenna in foil to block RF signals, or move it very far away from the node (or some other way to block/reduce RF signal), then try to remove failed node. The foil can sometimes reduce RF signal to enough so the node won’t respond to the ping request. Doesn’t always work.
Make an NVM backup, then use the nvmedit tool to remove the node and restore the NVM as a backup. Very risky if you don’t know what you’re doing.
In all of the cases the device will probably continue to send messages because it still thinks it’s in a network. The messages will be ignored by the controller but still take up network bandwidth.
Thanks. Just to confirm: does the “remove failed node” command only remove a single targeted failed node or does it remove ALL nodes currently listed as “dead”? (The wording in the description in the Z-Wave JS UI interface is ambiguous…)