Running flawlesly here (12 devices - all mains connected). Have you included the devices securely or insecurely ? Have you looked at the routing graph to see if all devices go via 1 node for example. Is everything Zwave plus ?
I am thinking of going back to using my finger for lights and guessing the temperature. HA is beautiful and so is every other device I throw at it. With venv the world is my oysterā¦until it comes to z-wave. I face another z-wave disaster due to my own inexperience with docker. And I donāt think I had a backup plan in place for the XML files, thatās all on me. Tonight Iām sad and looking for some other solution because I face having to remove/include everything again. Until today I was still going through the process of fixing the network from the last time I made a mess. Iāve never had to rebuild my Hue network ever and itās so easily integrated into HA. Z-wave is a nightmare because renaming the nodes in the source changes how HA sees the devices. Then I have to double-check every automation. Even with find and replace itās tedious. I have a Vera device that I can use in place but it has itās own host of problems.
Thatās what made me stop trying with HA Z-Wave options.
Hubitat works great as long as you donāt do automation with the hub.
Just link it with the custom component and itās the perfect bridge.
Iām going to look at this today. Do you know if this is ābetterā than the Vera? I didnāt like the Vera interface and itās z-wave system seemed slower.
So back when I used SmartThings everybody said that Vera was āoldā and didnāt support many devices.
Now I know theyāve done some stuff lately but I honestly havenāt given them a shot.
IF and this is a big IF Home Assistant nails Z-Wave and thereās none of this dead node business that ruined two of my weekends anymore I will switch to HA Z-Wave to get rid of as many things as possible but Iām not holding my breath.
Hubitat is local, itās very fast if youāre just using the custom component with HA.
There is an issue with it needing to be rebooted.
Itās nowhere near as bad if you donāt have any automations in Hubitat, mine are all in HA so back when I was curious I didnāt have to reboot it for weeks.
Now I just have a script in HA that reboots it once a week for me.
I think Iām going to need to go this route, if only for my sanity. I canāt tell how much time Iāve spent fighting z-wave. This morning my wife felt bad for me and suggested throwing money at the situation. Alas, itās not money I need to fix this problem. (and if there are super amazing products for the ultra wealthy, I canāt afford it!). Bad news for me is that Hubitat is out of stock. I canāt find at Amazon either. The Vera is good. To be honest Iām worried about where the code is written. I know, probably a moot point. It doesnāt like my garage door covers, and I doesnāt play well with my zwave lock. Sigh.
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Oh bummer itās out of stock. The SmartThings integration works really well but you might need a Nabu Casa account. Plus SmartThings isnāt local and just stops working for no good reason and you canāt just reboot it like Hubitat.
Hubitat isnāt perfect but itās got z-wave done pretty well. It has some CPU problems though. Or has Java architecture issues. If you run automations in HA and just use it as a bridge itās very solid.
I stick with HA for everything - in the past I just used Vera as a hub. HA is frigging awesome, so anything I can automate or write a script for, I prefer to do it there.
At the risk of starting a heated debate; Iāll simply say z-wave is just problematic to use an euphemism.
I made the mistake of being the first thing i implemented in HA 3.5 years ago, because the people that have already spent a ton of money on it will swear by it regardless of whether is good or not.
So like others i was new to HA, z-wave is commercially available in a plethora of flavours and like i said lots of posts here said it was great. Needless to say, I had the same problems you described and more!!
Six months later I know a bit more and went all wifi for switches, flashed with tasmota. Yes you need to upgrade your network, but a strong (UBIQUITY) network is just useful in so many ways. These sonoff wifi switches have been running for 3 years reliably.
I then started experimenting with rf for motion and contact sensors. I used openmqttgateway and sonoff rfbridge with tasmota. Main limitation with these rf sensors is no battery feedback, but hey for the price of these sensors you can just programmatically change the battery every year and still be 1/5 of the cost of a z-wave equivalent. The motion sensors are very reliable, Iāve now had them for 3 years and have had no problems. In fact theyāre very useful because they can be immediately reset and subsequently triggered with no delay.
The contact sensors on the other hand, not so much. Some times they would stay open even though the door was closed, etc.
Enter zigbee. I replaced all the contact sensors with zigbee (aqara) and linked them to HA via zigbee2mqtt. It just works! MQTT just works with almost anything and itās robust.
Iāve also used zigbee2tasmota and itās equally good. Both options present the possibility of having the āhubā remotely located and connected via wifi, which means no need to plug a usb to your server/pi or whatever.
So I use wifi light switches, rf motion sensors with sonof rfbridges and zigbee contact sensors.
Hope this gives you a bit more food for thought.
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Hmmm I might have to take the wife up on the offer to throw money at it.
Yea I think the difference is the openness of Zigbee versus Z-Wave.
Zigbee isnāt open source but itās cheaper and prolifically sold, so itās everywhere, more people know how to program for it.
Z-Wave is more expensive and only one company historically made the chip for it.
I think the chip architecture was released for licensing or something so things might get cheaper but itās still on the way out.
I go Zigbee or WiFi whenever possible, that being said Iām really cheap and have existing Z-Wave devices, so I will continue to integrate them into whatever system I have until itās impossible or they burn a hole in the wall theyāre installed in.
Can you post a graph of your network ? Have you included the devices insecurely ?
Hi all - thanks for all the responses.
To answer some of the questions
Can you post a graph of your network
Not at the moment because Iām using SmartThings
Have you included the devices insecurely
My adventures have included completely secure, completely insecure and a mixture. Makes no difference to the stability
Enter zigbee
My Z-Wave network is largely for the sensors it provides - temperature, humidity, motion and so on. When I looked at Zigbee it appeared that all the manufacturers had largely concentrated on using Zigbee for lighting and the few sensors that are available arenāt little devices with multiple functions like the Aeotec multisensors.
Hubitat
Hubitat, like Wink, never seems to be in stock. In my āresearchā these are the two platforms that keep coming up as being reliable which is probably why theyāre never in stock. Also, the Hubitat integration to HA still seems really clunky. I found lots of people saying that they can turn lights off but canāt turn them back on again without going in to Hubitat.
12 devices - all mains connected
This is something people keep mentioning. A lot of my devices are mains or USB powered but not all of them. Itās impossible to run power to two places in my house without major surgery on the building and thereās the bathrooms where I donāt want mains power. Is it the general experience of everyone that battery powered nodes are the problem? For clarification, in my setup about 1 in 4 nodes is battery powered.
Bummer. Iād sell you mine if I werenāt stuck on it in the same predicament as you.
Not always but but you seem to have a nice 1:4 ratio, the reason behind that is battery nodes do not contribute to your mesh network, they are an endpoint. Your zwave issues could be a symptom of too many battery powered devices in an area not contributing to the network.
Example: 2 rooms far to the east, have 2 battery powered montion sensors, and the closest mains/always on node is 3 rooms out. This will make for a very unhappy network.
Without a network graph, itās just guessing ā¦