I’m not sure if anyone else is seeing this, but I’m seeing horrible Z-Wave performance with my HUSBZB-1. Zigbee performance works great, just not Z-Wave. I have a two story house (mainly concrete walls) but fairly open space. I have the HUSBZB-1 centrally located via a USB over Ethernet extender and even made sure that I have Z-Wave extenders at least every 10-20 feet apart, but I’m still seeing rtt times of over 2000ms on my 2nd hop devices resulting in delayed response from my dashboard. In my Z-Wave graph, nothing is more than two hops to the controller. Some devices that are right next to each other (same electrical gang) have big differences in rtt and do not have the same direct path the controller. What gives. I’ve re-healed the network many times without success.
Anyone else seeing anything like this? How can I improve the Z-Wave performance here?
I have entirely different hardware and a very stable z-wave. But I didn’t get there without similar trouble.
Granted, that too was on another home automation system and other hardware entirely. But there I found out the hard way that S0 security requires way more data and way more processing in the nodes. That leads to way more that can go wrong. Also I read security levels also sometimes use lower transmission power.
Because I do not have any locks or other sensitive things like that, and because unsecure z-wave sounds way less unsecure than it actually is, I started including all devices unsecure. Since then on the old system everything started running way faster and without any hitches. So when I changed to Home Assistant I did the same, with the same stable result. And I also use associations where I can, so I do not need Home Assistant to turn lights on.
I cannot prove that running S0 security on HA would also be bad, nor do I know if S2 security would have done better (it should). But almost all of my devices don’t support S2, and I have no reason to run risks of destroying something good. But my advice would be, check what security you’re using, and consider trying unsecure if you are using anything else.
The bad news: security levels are set at pairing, and cannot be changed without pairing again.
You might be on to something. Most of the devices on the network were added as S2 security. I also realized that adding devices that were further away from the controller took a bit more time after entering the 5 digit ID and sometimes timed out and failed back to S0 security. The devices all in question are Zooz 700 series switches.
Are we absolutely sure I can’t simply re-interview the devices and simply check the ‘Reset security classes’ during the process? I have to un-pair and re-pair?
Yes you MUST re-pair the device to change the security level. And yes S0 is bad if your device supports S2.
I ONLY pair S0 devices securely if they will participate as a component of a ZWave based security system. (They’re at least 3x more chatty at the network layer alone)
Got it. I miss spoke about about the devices failing back to S0 security. Some actually failed back to NO security. Additionally, if some devices are S2 and some are none, what happens in terms of the mesh network? Will S2 devices ONLY route through other S2 devices or can they route through No Security devices as well? I may end up re-pairing all my ZEN76 switches with No Security to see if the performance improves.
As I understand it S2 security by design pairs with low transmission power, so it is harder to hack at this sensitive procedure. So you may need to pair close to the coordinator, move it to the desired location and heal the network to establish an optimal route.
So in my quest to get z-wave stable on my HUSBZB-1, I’m now running out of options. I’ve gone ahead and re-included ALL Zooz Zen76 switches with ‘No security’, tried to include distant devices close to controller as possible (although it’s not recommended by HA as it leads to broken routes), added additional mains nodes for better routing. Nothing seems to help. Still seeing devices with over 10K ms rtt times (below) as well has huge delays. At this point, I’m not sure it it’s the HUSBZB-1 itself (connected centrally using a n USB over Ethernet extender), physical infrastructure (solid concrete walls?) or Z-WaveJS itself (software update?). My next step is to split up the controller by getting an Aeotec Z-Stick 7 & maybe a Sonoff ZigBee controller. Currently at a loss. Thoughts?
Solved!!! So it turns out that my issue was related solely on the HUSBZB-1 itself. I purchased the Aeotec Z-Stick 7, re-paired my 50+ devices and now I’m seeing rtt times in 20-50ms range! No more delays and log entries that state ‘waiting for ACK from controller…’ The part that sucked was that the HUSBZB-1 was on a firmware so old, it didn’t support NVM backups, so I had to rebuild the network from scratch.
Oh well, lesson learned. I’m still using it as a Zigbee coordinator as that performance was not as bad but will eventually swap it out for a Home Assistant SkyConnect when it arrives for the addition of Matter support.
