I’m running HAOS bare metal (2025.3.2), with the Z-Wave UI JS addon. I currently have 103 Z-Wave devices managed by the addon, mostly from Zooz. I keep the firmware current on all of them.
The addon prompted me to update it to v3.24.0 (or v9.33.0?) earlier today, so I obliged. Upon completion, HA showed me 32 “device configuration file changed” warnings, where I’ll either need to re-interview each device, or ignore the warning. It’s not too big of a deal for my wired devices, but the wireless ones can be annoying.
I recall this happening a couple of times in the last ~18 months, which is a higher level of maintenance than I’m comfortable with for so many devices. Is this a normal thing I should just expect from Z-Wave devices on a semi-regular basis? What’s the impact if I decide to ignore all of these warnings moving forward?
Ignoring them depends entirely on what has changed. The only way to know that is to diff the config file from the previous release. The update notification provides no more information to HA than “it changed”.
Sometimes it’s as benign as the description of a configuration parameter, or the device name. Ignoring these would have no real impact.
Most often these are going to be new configuration parameters, or bug fixes for existing parameter definitions. Without updating you won’t be able to use the new ones, or the existing ones won’t work properly. Ignoring these will only affect the ability to use the config parameters.
There could also workarounds to fix buggy devices (via added compatibility flags). Your device may not work properly without these changes, this is one you would not want to ignore.
Zooz in particular is constantly adding new configuration parameters via firmware updates, so you might expect them to change again. For other brands, they may never change again.
Sometime Z-Wave JS refactors something, which may result in a detected change but not user-visible change. Really difficult to know if you need to re-interview or not there.
If you re-interview a battery device, the command will be scheduled for the next wake up interval. So you don’t need to do anything extra compared to a mains-powered device except wait (unless that device requires a manual wake up).
If you ignore them, just remember that and take a pause before you seek support for the device if you have issues with it. If that happens, perform the re-interview first to see if it solves your problem.
Of course, the downside of doing a re-interview is an error that causes the interview to fail prematurely, which would make the device unusable in HA. You won’t know unless you’re watching.