How to exclude Z-Wave devices from old controller

Configuration
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tl;dr: How do I issue a Z-Wave “general exclude” from Home Assistant with Z-wave stick?

Slightly longer: I have a bunch of stuff in a new house that I want to reset, but I have no access to the old controller. According to the thingsthataresmart wiki, there is a “general exclude” command in the Z-Wave protocol that will allow you to exclude any device within range, without having to use the controller it was paired to. How do I do that with Home Assistant?

Full back story:
I moved into a new house with a bunch of z-wave sensors and door locks already installed. Cool! I thought - I’ll just pair all of those with Home Assistant and have everything up in no time…Wrong!

The system is Vivint, which is apparently quite proprietary and hard to get into. I did a bit of searching and found I have a sky panel which is hard/impossible to get access to outside of a Vivint contract. So I just tried poking around to remove sensors. I can press “delete sensor” on the panel, and it removes it from the list, but it doesn’t appear to actually do anything to exclude it from the z-wave network. There are also door locks, but those are in a separate section of the interface in Vivint’s panel and there is no delete button at all on those. I fought for a while trying to find the user manual for resetting the door locks manually (some combination of removing batteries and holding buttons was supposed to do it, but did nothing), and tried to call vivint support, but they refuse to do anything without me signing up for a contract - which is expressly what I do not want to do, and the reason I want to exclude the devices.

Finally I searched for Z-wave protocol information for excluding devices and found the thingsthataresmart wiki page saying that there is a “general exclude” command. I did a bunch of searching through the HA forums for how to do it, but I’ve only found people trying to fix devices that were mixed up in HA itself, not devices paired to another controller, so here I am, begging for your help! I’ve tried poking around in the z-wave control panel. I pressed the remove node button, but I only have one node - the controller itself, and the logs seem to indicate that it has completed the command in less than 1/1000th of a second - not nearly enough time for me to go press the exclude button on the lock.

Logs are here:

2019-07-10 18:55:45.928 Info, FUNC_ID_ZW_REMOVE_NODE_FROM_NETWORK:
2019-07-10 18:55:45.928 Info, REMOVE_NODE_STATUS_LEARN_READY
2019-07-10 18:55:45.928 Detail, Node001,   Expected callbackId was received
2019-07-10 18:55:45.928 Detail, Node001,   Expected reply was received
2019-07-10 18:55:45.928 Detail, Node001,   Message transaction complete
2019-07-10 18:55:45.928 Detail,
2019-07-10 18:55:45.928 Detail, contrlr, Removing current message
2019-07-10 18:55:45.928 Detail, Notification: ControllerCommand - Waiting
2019-07-10 18:55:45.932 Info, WriteNextMsg Controller nothing to do
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I have not come along the “general exclude” command. There are two other methods that allow to exclude devices:

  1. resetting a device. I worked mainly with Fibaro devices and they all have a reset function that puts them back into factory default including deleting all network associations.
  2. You can use any ZWave controller and bring it into a “Exclude” mode and then press the physical button of device (some require single press while other 3 presses within a certain time frame) and it will remove the device from any ZWave network - even if it was associated with a different network. Maybe this is what is meant by “general exclude”.
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Re: 2 yes, putting the controller into exclude mode is what I want. There are two types of exclude modes, a specific device exclude and a general exclude. The question here is how to get home assistant to send the general exclude to the attached z-wave controller.

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I don’t see the “exclude” service listed in HA so you would likely need to find some way to do it using a dedicated OZW platform agnostic program. But, since either way you do it you still need to do some action on each device individually I think it would be just as easy to do a factory reset on each device and move on instead of searching for a way to run the “exclude” command and end up with the same result.

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The Remove Node button is the “exclude” function. Usually pressing this in the zwave menu then executing the exclude procedure on the device in question, will force it out of it’s previous network.

1 Like
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I thought that would only work on a device that was paired with the current controller? At least that’s how the docs read…

What the OP seems to be asking is to be able to remove a device from a controller that is not currently active/available.

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I’ve done this procedure with an open-box zwave device and it worked, but factory reset seems to be the best option honestly.

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I guess it’s worth a try. If it works then so much the better. If not then they haven’t lost anything except a button click or two. :slightly_smiling_face:

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I was able to exclude using the “REMOVE NODE” button. In the wiki I linked, it implies there is a different type of exclude for a paired vs non-paired node, but I’m actually not convinced there is anything other than a “general exclude.” After playing with 3 different systems (HA, SmartThings, Vivint) a bit, each of them just has a button to put it into exclusion mode, and you can press a button on any z-wave device to exclude it from whatever network it was a part of. I think I was just tripped up initially by the lack of feedback from the HA interface, but I was able to glean what was happening from the logs.

1 Like
10

Good to know. Thanks!

11

Is there a way to do this when you don’t have access to the original vivint panel? I’m in a similar situation where I bought a home and the previous owners did not remove the lock from their vivint system