I am starting to hate zwave

Configuration Z-Wave
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They never completed the interview and considering my devices, They never left the node stage. They never got named, they never created entities. They just sat there saying dead or complete. My mesh is very strong. Every zwave device I have minus 1 plug, dome mousetrap and the garage opener are in my living room, only the lock is the battery-powered device there. That means I have a siren, lock, and the zooz power strip in a single room. The devices are no more than 10 feet and 1 wall from my hub.

You can keep trying to pass off the issue to be me but itā€™s simply not true. Zwave is a complete pain in the ass compared to zigbee. This isnā€™t an upgrade to zwavejs issue. This has been an issue with zwave/home assistant issue for much longer than either ozw and zwavejs have been a thing. Itā€™s not communicative of what is going on. Really having to read logs to see what is going on? Thatā€™s stupid and barely fixed in zwavejs to mgtt.

Itā€™s clearly not user error either considering I was able to get them paired without issue once I factory reset everything. Itā€™s frankly that the dead nodes where preventing the pairing of device again which I have run into before and ZwaveJS has no way currently to remove them. You have to install zwavejs to mqtt to do it.

I like my zwave devices, once they are paired they are great. This isnā€™t meant to be me bashing zwave. I think the zwave devices I do have seem to be in general higher quality then my zigbee stuff. That said the pain in the ass that is pairing them sucks.

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I donā€™t mean to keep arguing with you and Iā€™ll stop now, but seriously, I have 20-something zwave devices spread through a pretty big double brick house and havenā€™t had any issues whatsoever. They were originally setup using the old zwave integration, recently switched to zwavejs by following Petroā€™s tutorial and it went smooth as silk.

1 Like
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I can attest that switching to zwave js can have issues during the interview process. Both of my kwikset 910 locks failed to interview when I switched over. The one closest I was able to get it working in place but the other one on the other side of the house I had to remove from the door to get it to be happy. And my one battery operated door sensor needed to be brought close to the zstick. Left in place even waking it, it wouldnā€™t connect. Once interviewed they seemed ok.

Another thing I havenā€™t seen mentioned is RF interference. Just because you have a bigger house doesnā€™t mean the network topography is more challenging for a smaller area. Often mid sized houses on small lots are in dense neighborhoods where you are more likely to have cordless phones, baby monitors and who knows what else causing issues.

And while the 2.4ghz band maybe prone to more interference and be crowded out it can sustain substantially more bandwidth than the 900mhz z-wave uses.