Building Z-Wave Networks in HA

Configuration Z-Wave
1

I’ve been having some Z-Wave issues over the last few weeks and have done multiple Z-Wave network rebuilds from scratch. Just been doing another one today.

As a result I have some thoughts I would like to share:

  • Adding nodes is pretty straightforward - you do need to allow some time for everything to get discovered, I think I messed this up for one of my nodes and I now have an unknown entity. Rather than panic I am going to leave it for a few days and see if it fixes itself

  • You pretty much need to do all your renaming for each device after adding the node - choose a naming standard that works for you for each device type and use it for the node and all associated entities ie. all my PIR entities are <room_name>pir_sensor<value_type> eg. study_pir_sensor_temperature

  • I always include a friendly name so that it looks nice in the UI

  • If you don’t follow this sequence I find it gets confusing as to which device is which

  • If something goes wrong or you need to reset you are stuck with the “bad” nodes - best advice I can see is to go in and manually edit the entity_registry which is not supported and I have had mixed results - for now live with the bad stuff

  • Once you have everything setup and in place leave everything well alone to allow the mesh to configure itself

I think the one thing we desperately need in the Z-Wave world is some kind of “REBUILD” button in HA that would force a rebuild of all the Z-Wave nodes from the current active OpenZWave configuration. In my head this button would do the following:

  1. Warn the user that all their Z-Wave entities will be reset - then warn them again
  2. Delete all the Z-wave Devices in the device registry (maybe with the exception of the controller)
  3. Delete all the Z-Wave Entities in the entity registry (including all the lovely renaming etc…)
  4. Parse the OpenZwave configuration and rebuild the devices and entities from there

Its a bit of a weapon of last resort but would be great for clearing out removed or failed nodes until such time as this function becomes part of normal Z-Wave operations. Before the new Z-Wave way of doing things this is how we used to handle OpenZWave node renames, add the node, rename the node (which would rename all the entities), shutdown HA, delete or rename entity_registry.xml, fire up HA and it would rediscover all the Z-Wave stuff to include the new names.

What do folks think?

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