I see an entity called sensor.700_series_based_controller_node_status, but I can’t enable it, it’s marked “unavailable” and my attempt to enable it apparently fails.
Depends on how you ‘switch’ (see later)
It’s supposed to be - the ‘node status’ entity for the controller itself isn’t valid and should have never been available in the first place - recent versions of ZWaveJS and ZWaveJS2mqtt fixed that and why you cant enable it. Not sure why the node status node is still available on your install, have you updated your ZWave integration? In any case - this part isn’t an issue.
Making some assumptions based on what you posted… It sounds like you have a 700-series based Zwave network and have been dealing with unresponsive nodes. Your first recourse should be locating the latest firmware for that stick. Verify it has a version of 7.17.2 or BETTER. (The patch that was directly intended to help the dead node issue) If you’re not to that firmware level, upgrade to that first, then try the ping automation in this thread. Upgrading the firmware on the stick is nondestructive.
If the firmware and ping script doesn’t work, (it’s by no means perfect, I have a node drop now and then - but for the most part they just work now) and you want to try rolling back from a 700 to a 500 stick, (again, probably not necessary) if you’re running ZWaveJS2mqtt at least, it can back up the NVM of the Z-stick and restore it to a 500 stick (meaning you don’t lose your network/entities, etc.) I do not know if you can do that procedure with base ZWaveJS. Im sure someone knows that answer.
So the solution in this thread - the sensor and ‘ping’ automation - is already obsolete and can no longer be made to work?
I get it now - I just need to remove those lines from the yaml. The rest may still work.
I decided not to try upgrading the firmware. Too many posts from people who said they did that and lost everything, or that it didn’t even solve the dead node problem. If I could do it from within HA on my RPi, then maybe, but I’m not jumping through all the hoops to do it on a Windows machine.
Can’t get even the sensor part to work. It initially detected a dead node, but then I restored that node with a ping, and the sensor count never went back to zero.
I’m absolutely giving up on ZWave at this point. Just ordered my first wifi wall switch and will now start replacing all my ZWave devices with wifi equivalents.
It will be a happy day when I can pull out that Zooz 700 controller and just junk it. ZWave, IMHO, is a dog that is never going to hunt. It’s been an expensive lesson.
Z-wave is being used by 15 000 installations on Home Assistant. Similar number can be expected for Z-wave2MQTT.
Not even counting all the native gateways owners, like Vera, Fibaro, SmartThings.
If it was that bad, how is it possible, there are such little complaints?
Yes, it has been an expensive lesson, but that is not Z-wave’s fault… 
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I ran for YEARS without ever experiencing a single dead or unresponsive node on Gen5 stick with about 20 devices (4 battery powered) - Indigo Domotics.
Then I ran for a couple of months on Home Assistant without any such troubles using Gen5.
The move to 700-series ZST10-700 brought with it the dead nodes issues, including (but much less frequent) on the latest 7.17.2 firmware. There’s no inherent problem with Z-Wave - just with 700 series controllers (don’t know if the issue is specific to ZWaveJS however).
As an aside, I don’t recall hearing about anyone who lost their nodes doing a Z-Wave firmware upgrade on their ZST-10-700 as outlined on Zooz’s site. The hoops to jump are registering/downloading the software. The update itself was unremarkable and painless.
You won’t likely find long-term peace of mind with WiFi devices. The availability of products isn’t the same, many vendors have atrocious firmware/support or device performance - there is absolutely no standard. “WiFi” describes the radio, not the platform. So good luck - this is like giving up a house to live in a busy youth hostel. If chaos is your thing, you’ll have the time of your life.
I’m going to tear down my entire Z-Wave network and rebuild it again using my Gen5 stick. It would be great if it were easier to maintain all top-level device info and automations unchanged, but I’ll manually fix all that too if I have to.
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Yes I’m aware some (many?) have had good results with ZWave. In my case it’s been endless hassles.
I’m just now in the process of replacing a ZWave switch with a Wifi unit. Tried exclusion, several times - tried different sequences - put the device in exclusion mode first - ok, try the controller first - run back and forth because it’s a wired-in device - it never worked. Tried “remove failed device” and that doesn’t work either because it was never excluded.
Absolutely typical of my whole ZWave experience.
If you’re on Zwavejs2mqtt you can use the backup and ‘downgrade’ to a 500 stick without having to trash your network. It was added a s a feature last year specifically because of this issue. I’m sure it’s not without its own issues but just know it’s available.
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I’ll do exactly that, thanks.
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I did this exact same thing about a month ago and moved my entire Z-Wave mesh back to a Gen 5 Stick…Haven’t had a single problem since. Good luck on your transition…(it should be worth it!)
I am running a Aeon Gen 5 stick (Not 5+). FW: v1.1 SDK: v4.54.0. I have some 65nodes. I am running HASS as a VM under Proxmox on a 64bit architecture machine . USB has been properly passed through and I have a USB2 hub between the machine and the stick. I am still loosing nodes which are back after a ping!
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I had 4 wired-in devices that kept going ‘unavailable’, and all were from Leviton. That doesn’t mean Leviton is at fault, but I decided to replace all them with wifi equivalents and reduce my use of Zwave. I just finished replacing them and getting the new units properly named so my existing HA automations still work.
I’m still using a few Zwave devices and a 700 controller, and I’m not discarding the problematic Levitons. Someday, if there’s solid reliable 700 firmware AND I can install it from within HA with zero risk of losing anything, I might get back into ZWave. But not today.
So I bite the bullet and switched to an aeotec gen 5+ stick. 105 devices and 1157 used entities. Loving the response time and not having dead nodes. I tried several suggestions on here for moving everything to the new stick and could not get them to work. So I had to manually move all the devices. It took 2 long days to move everything and set everything back up. All the automations and scenes worked. But the UI was broke for automations. You will have to setup the automations again if you want to use the UI. Also deleted and setup again Apple home. Just wish I could use both sticks. I have a lot of aeotec multi sensor 6 and 7’s and they can be network hogs.
If your on the edge about switching do it. It is worth the headache of one weekend to have a stable network and everything working like it should.
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has anyone notice super high cpu utilization for this sensor? The spike in CPU happens the moment I added the sensor, and drops the minute I removed it. GUI was largely unresponsive during time when the sensor was live and zwave & zigbee were also dramatically delayed or unresponsive. Just wondering if I did something really wrong, or it’s the nature of this sensor. (I have 49 total zwave nodes, 4 battery devices. It seems like the sensor may slow down with more zwave devices as it scans for them and iterates through them?
You didn’t describe what sensor it is? model number matters
totally fair, apologies. The latest one by bretton.wade above - but with the exclude filters removed. linking here to pastebin for exact script. This was contained in a templates.yaml file before I removed it and calmed down the system again. dead zwave devices sensor - Pastebin.com
HAOS 2022.08.2 (supervisor 2022.08.3, OS 8.4)
I set this up for my network because I was periodically having 1 or 2 nodes out of about 40 go down. It’s destroying my network in whole unfortunately. I implemented it last night and when I woke up everything was effectively down and the entire network was super slow. It wasn’t until I turned off the automation that everything slowly came back.
In short, I think the automation is blasting network traffic and really bogging things down.
@tiwing I just saw your post. Maybe mine was CPU instead of zwave network, I didn’t consider that. I honestly don’t really want to try again.
Just thought I’d pitch in my experience as well. I have a gen 5 stick. Never had a single node isse until i was forced to upgrade to zwave js since my old zwave system was tossed out by home assistant. I’ve never upgraded the firmware for my gen 5 since i bought it like 4-5 years ago. And i only get the node issues when ever i update the zwave js plugin or when i restart ha/zwave js. I Never have any issues if i don’t restart or update anything.
But if you’re like me who has used ha for several years by now, then you know that not upgrading is a bad idea, you’ll pay the price later when not just one thing has a broken in the update but a whole list of stuff are broken.
So anyway, i do believe zwave js are to share in on the blame here too. Something certainly isn’t as robust as the old system that came with ha was.
That’s my two cents anyway. Take it for what it’s worth.
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The ping of dead nodes still “works” to bring my dead nodes back. With about 30 Z-wave devices I see at least one go down every day in my logs. I changed the automation to fire every 15 seconds if a node was unavailable (rather than when the node transitions to unavailable) and don’t have problems with my network or CPU being overly busy that I’m aware of.
Dear anonymous 700 series victim. Justs wanted to introduce myself with this post:
I originally bought a HUSBZB-1 because i tried to standardize on z-wave, but i also have some recessed ceiling lights i could only get as zigbee. Seemed to work fine, but when i researched, it seemed as if i could not backup/restore the zwave config on the stick. So i replaced it with a zst10-700 and some separate zigbee stick. And since then i think i have more radio problems with z-wave, exactly with dead nodes i can ping to revive them.
I was speculating that it might be radio interference between the zigbee and zwave stick. Both already are on USB extension cables with ferrite rings (connected to RPI4 running HAOS).
I then did download the SIlabs firmware upgrade onto windows (i hate using windows for this). Just 12 ? GByte of software to install the latest zst10-700 firmware. How easy! Such a nice move from SiLabs to force simple end-users to install a whole bloody development system for ALL their products.
Ok, not sure how much it helped. I still have dead nodes. I am almost about to go back to the HUSBZB-1, screw the ability to do backups - but re-enrolling 28 devices is really no fun.