Hi all,
A bit of a long-shot question, I think I probably know the answer but asking here to see if there’s any glimmer of hope.
I recently started renting this house that has a pretty extensive z-wave installation (>60 devices), the owner is not tech savvy at all and contracted a local company to set up the whole system. The problem is that the z-wave hub runs a software designed by this company and despite that it provides an app that works pretty well to control devices (z-wave only), after some poking around I don’t see how I can integrate it with HA.
I’ve been using HA for many years and I would ideally integrate this z-wave network in my install but currently I only see the following options:
Get my own controller and reset the entire network. Sounds like a pain given the amount of devices in the network, plus I’d probably need to revert back to the old controller when I leave
Try adding a second controller to the network and hope that the existing controller lets me do that
I already contacted the controller manufacturer to check if they have an API but no reply yet. They have an Alexa skill but I couldn’t find the code to see if anything could be done.
As mentioned in the beginning, I have little hopes that anything beside erasing the existing network would work but I’m not a z-wave expert at all so if you see any other options I’d be very interested
Thanks !
Not really If they don’t support integration into ha at the controller level the recourse is moving everything to a new network.
…And if it were my home and I were renting I would be thoroughly hacked (pun intended) if you reset my ZWave network that I’d paid for an installer to setup…
Owner? Yeah if toss the proprietary box and move it all to HA on a ZWave controller stick.
Whether or not you can add a device as a secondary controller is dependent on the software the new device has and not the existing controller. As far as the existing controller is concerned you are adding a regular device.
You can verify if a device is capable of acting as a secondary controller by going to https://products.z-wavealliance.org/ ► Locating Your Device ►On The Product Page Click View Command Classes ► If the Command Class Called Inclusion Controller is listed then that the device can act as Secondary Controller.
You cannot natively add a device as a secondary controller in HA. To include a USB stick or PI Hat as secondary controller you need to use the Z-Wave PC Controller tool from the Simplicity Studio software. Once included you can connect your controller to home assistant and view all of your devices.
There are some limitations when using a secondary controller. The first is that some nodes only support 1 node in the lifeline group. This means that if you have something like a door sensor it will only report status updates to 1 controller and not both. The other limitation is that node 1 is responsible for routing and keeping track up the assigned node ids so if it ever goes offline you won’t be able to heal your network or add and remove devices.
Other then this adding a secondary controller is extremely easy. Here is a photo showing how I have two controllers included into my z-wave network.
