Frustration with Z-Wave Yale Locks

A little, but fairly often I find myself opening ZWave JS UI to ping and refresh the lock nodes because they’re unavailable in HA, or the state is just wrong.

Has anyone found a solution to this issue? I upgraded to the Zooz 700 series controller and have recently begun experiencing issues with both of my Yale locks becoming “unavailable”. Both are within at least 10-15’ of a hardwired repeater, one is within 3’. I have changed batteries and reinterviewed but nothing seems to keep them consistently on the network. Occasionally refreshing in the Z-Wave JS UI brings them temporarily back online but then inevitably they become unavailable. Any help is appreciated

I haven’t. Mine are still moderately inconsistent. I saw a new Philips Z-Wave LR that seems intriguing. But it doesn’t have a fingerprint, which I find incredibly convenient. It’s also touchscreen, which is ok, but I also prefer the buttons of the Yale one I have. I had another Yale one that was touchscreen bug out on me and the touchscreen part stopped working.

I’m hopeful that more Z-Wave LR locks show up on the market. Or maybe a module for the Yale will support that.

You should check out the kwikset 620 LR. My 4 favorite things about it are the battery life, the keypad, the ability to easily re-key and long range.

I looked into this one, but it doesn’t come in matte black and doesn’t have fingerprint, so it was a non-starter for me. I think my biggest issue is that I like the aesthetics and physical functions of the Yale locks, but their z-wave performance is frankly horrible.

The Kwikset 620 LR does come in matte black that’s the version i have. Also I saw some articles about a new 800 Series Yale Lock with a Fingerprint Reader. From what I understand its only available through adt.

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Oh strange. The Kwikset website only shows bronze, nickel and brass.

Would be interesting to get an 800 series to see if it performed better. I currently have the YRD450-F-ZW3 ones in my Yale locks

I have the contemporary model which is square shaped. The other style doesn’t have matte black.

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I’ve been tempted by the Philips lock too but hate the idea of replacing these locks that mostly work, minus increasingly unreliable Z-Wave performance. I appreciate the response

I have been attempting to stabilize my Yale locks and recently set return and priority routes on both, which seems to have helped. In viewing my network graph in the Zwave JS web UI, I noticed one of my locks was using a node that was pretty far away as a repeater. I added the closest node to each as both the priority and return route and have seen a noticeable increase in reliability. Might be worth a shot.

Hearing the problems with ZWAVE locks, my only recommendation is to build a better ZWAVE mesh network. I’ve been using ZWAVE locks for over 6 years because of the automation. I started out with SmartThings, there I would get a lot of miscellaneous lock issues with my locks. I learned it was all related to my ZWAVE MESH because the locks were battery powered. Since then, I’ve always overkilled on my ZWAVE MESH, adding repeaters and outlets, in addition to the other AC powered devices. I always have a repeater/extender, plus outlets placed all over the place, in use and not in use, but to build a better network.

I personally use 5 Yales YRD226 in 4 different HA instances. 2 YRD-256 in 2 HA instances. I’ve recommended others to use the YRD-226 with HA, 5 different people, who are all using multiple Yale ZWAVE. All of the locks work and work well with some FANTASTIC HA Automations. I have the locks triggering many automations.

When I recommend Yale ZWAVE and HA to others, I tell them to get a Aeotec reapeater\extender (ZW189) to put in the middle of the controller and lock. Then get any ZWAVE outlet, put the outlet as close to the lock as possible. You can add whatever outlets or repeaters or just outlets or just repeaters, as long as the are AC powered. This results in little to no issues and excellent battery life.

One little tiny note. I know people swear by ZWAVE JS UI and it is in use by many people and there are lots of reasons to use it, but me, personally, never really got ZWAVE JS UI to work perfectly, it always caused an issue. I can live without it, I use ZWAVE JS and set and forget. I’m tried many times to get ZWAVE JS UI to work to my satisfaction and it has not, but it is probably just my experience level and I ok with that. ZWAVE JS does everything I need,

I get what you’re saying, but I have a 20’x25’ garage. In that garage I now have 8 z-wave devices.

Hard Wired:

  • 2x Aeotec ZW189-C15
  • 2x Inovelli VZW31-SN
  • Zooz ZAC38
  • Zooz ZEN04

Battery:

  • Yale YRD450-F-ZW3
  • ZEN37 800LR (included as long range so not helping the mesh anyway)

The Yale lock is where the Green circle is, the Inovellis are where the red is (less than 3’ from the lock), and the purple are the various extenders (yes, one is in the middle of the garage on my garage door opener).

According to the rest of my architecture plans, the lower left extenders are no more than 40’ from the z-wave controller. The Yale lock in this garage will show the wrong state until I go into Z-Wave JS UI Add-On and hit refresh. The Inovelli switches are never offline, always respond to an on/off or level change and report the energy consumption without fail.

What route are the locks using?

And this is actually a perfect example. I was in the garage about 30 minutes ago, left the door unlocked. HA showed it as locked. Running the Link Stats action updated the status to unlocked.

That’s a long route. Do you have a lot of traffic on your zwave network?

Turn on zwave debug logging and see what gets captured when it fails to report its lock state.

I don’t think so, but I’m not sure how to quantify that. I have 40 nodes, 4 are long range.

I’ll try to grab some logs when a lock event should happen, but doesn’t. I feel like I did that in the past and when I looked, there was just nothing from the Yale nodes during that time at all.