Anyone want to share your most helpful tips for migrating from wink to a zwave stick?

[jwl173305361 (John Lindley)]

This is less of a cry for specific help, but more of a general “what is your experience?” post.

In the process of migrating from Wink > zwave stick for the second time, and am just as discouraged this time as last. Last time I moved everything back to Wink after I couldn’t get my garage door or locks to come over. This time I’m going to settle for just my doors, lights, and motion sensors. I’m convinced I’m doing something wrong as I do not hear, or see on this forum, about people having the same issues.

1. I’m not getting consistent updates from sensor devices… I’ll open a door and 4 or 5 entities will show in the logs, but none of them seem to be the one tied to something like “open” or “closed”. Same goes for motion sensors.
2. Not sure which entity is the best/most reliable, do not see obvious / human readable results like “open”, “detected”, “closed”, etc… I know there are different states like 1 or 255 that mean the same as open/closed. Mapping/templating things like 0 to “open” is possible, but between vendors it seems like a nightmare with my 50 or so sensors that are from 10 or so vendors. Because of #1 though, I’m not sure with entity I should actually be using because not all the entities for the device seems to be updating each time. For example, the binary_sensor will maintain “on” or “off” while some of the other sensors for the device will change when activity occurs.

I have a lot of zwave plus devices, like lights, throughout the home so I assumed that my coverage to all sensors were good.

[nanobra1n]

Did the same Wink → Z-wave transition. Did you customize the entities with the appropriate device class? Under Configuration > Customization add the appropriate device class for your sensor e.g. door or motion. That way the binary sensors will show up on the UI with the appropriate symbol and state. I did have a sensor where the binary sensor didn’t change, so I had to build my own template sensor based on the access_control value .

Also this project is useful to see if you have adequate connection between your nodes:

Z-Wave graph (without the python)

Hi folks. If this is considered bad etiquette, please feel free to kill post. I really liked having the ZWave Graph that @OmenWild had setup, but when I moved my setup to docker last week (hey, I was on vacation and felt the itch to change something). I didn’t feel like trying to figure out why it had broken, and hadn’t liked the external python script method anyway (personal preference, just more things to break). So I satisfied multiple itches at once, and converted what he had written to a …

[jwl173305361 (John Lindley)]

No, I didn’t know about that. I’ll give that a shot as it looks promising. Thanks for the response and ideas.

[roach (Scott Roach)]

I’m on the verge of doing this and am curious how much of a speed improvement you’ve seen by ditching wink?

[jwl173305361 (John Lindley)]

Quite a bit… when they work. When things work you really cannot notice a lag at all! Seriously, pretty much instant. For example, lights are on before the door is open enough for me to see in the room.

I’m getting better results than I described in my original post. It is seeming that between adding additional zwave plus devices, removing a few ?badly? discovered devices, and rebooting my NUC things are improving. (Linux admin that hates rebooting and finally broke!) I installed the zwave graph posted above it it pointed to me having many devices with multiple hops, so I’m going to install some zwave plus switches nearer to them.

I still need to work on the painful UI issue where I’m not seeing human-understandable 1’s, 0’s, and 255’s. One other thing… add the node, wait a minute, find the node in your states page, heal the node, move the device to its final resting place, and heal the node again. Every so often, restart HASS if those things don’t work and the device will show up in your states page.