I am running thermostats Eurotronic Spirit Z-Wave Plus bought at Hornbach. My Z-Wave Stick is a ZW090-C by AEON Labs (Aeotec zwave PLUS).
Before I controlled the thermostats with the Hornbach-Hub and connections have been stable. To gain more flexibility I now fully switched to Home Assistant. Unfortunately thermostats switch to unavailable multiple times a day. Often (not always) a stick becomes unavailable in the moment, when it should switch to a different temperature, so that it sticks with the previous one.
It’s not an issue of distance. I also inserted new batteries, just in case. A reason may be that I switch too many devices in the same minute (all at six o’clock). Maybe HA just notices in this moment that the connection has been lost. Because it does not adjust the temperature at all, I rather think of the latter reason.
Did you run into similar issues? Is the ZW090-C by AEON Labs a bad choice? How did you solve it?
Most important, if you run Eurotronic Spirit Z-Wave Plus without issues, wich z-wave stick do you use?
I am having the same issue. I have 23 such thermostats and a plenty of Z-wave smart plugs to act as mesh nodes for the thermostats. The whole setup is very unreliable on Z-wave JS. Just like you said, when a command is sent, no reply is received and the device is marked as dead. The command may or may not go through, regardless. It may wake up after some time once it sends a temperature update, but overall, the experience is really bad.
I am using a Z-Wave.Me stick. My hunch is that this is an issue on the Z-wave JS protocol implementation and not the actual hardware, but I don’t quite know enough about Z-wave internals to start debugging the root cause.
Luckily meanwhile it’s all stable. I did a factory reset of the stick, so that it starts counting the devices with 1 again. Then I did a full new setup. I only possess four z-wave devices, so that was no big issue.
Maybe this did fix it. More likely there was no real issue at all. I noticed that I turned off one thermostat, that didn’t come back, when HA did want to switch it on again. I decided do run it at a low temperature instead.
Interesting. I wonder if the problem is in the non-volatile memory contents or elsewhere. By backing up and restoring those, you could continue with the same network setup after the reset. I hate the thought of having to go through all thermostats once again…
