Is it possible to use 2 zwave dongles in one HA?

[Canedje]

Maybe stupid question, but is it possible to use two zwave dongles the same time in my RPI 4 with HA?
Because my current setup is not reliable and maybe splitting the zwave load over 2 dongles will help?

[Burningstone]

This is not possible currently, it may be with the new implementation of Z-Wave but I’m not sure. However I don’t think that 2 sticks will solve your problem. How do you notice it is not reliable? Do you have enought mains powered devices to form a good mesh?

[Canedje]

Thanks for your answer.
A pitty.
I started a threat about this subject:

Zwave not reliable

I’m runnig Home Assitant now for 2 weeks. Running on a Raspberry Pi4B 4Gb. I do have a conbee II Zigbee Dongle and a Zwave.me zwave dongle. After sometime at least once a day non of the zwave devices are reacting anymore or very slow (reacting after 20 seconds or so) I do need to do a reset of HA to get the system started again running for some time. I do not see very busy network on OZW. If I look to the PIRS in Overview they stil recieving signals going on and off. If I do try to switch…

I do have a good mesh.
I’m migraiting from Homey to HA.
In Homey it was working fine.
I had the same setup.
And the same flows.
So I’m quit frustrated that it is not reliable.

It looks like my traffic is not that heavy.

I just think: I still have Homey running. having it’s own zwave.
Can it be inferencing each other?

[tom_l]

@Canedje

Can it be inferencing each other?

Quite possibly. Especially if they are using the same dongle.

Though having said that I gave up on z-wave on home assistant. Too slow and unreliable. Not to mention the network initialisation required after each home assistant restart.

[Canedje]

for me that means a lot of investment and time thrown away

[tom_l]

One other solution I’ve seen posted here is to connect all zwave devices to a Vera and connect HA to that. Basically offloading all the zwave hub duties to an external device with more grunt than a USB dongle. Though I’m having trouble finding the thread…

Ahha! Found it (moved to top):

Think I'm done

Every single zwave node, all 50 of them, are totally screwed. I can’t take it. Zwave is total garbage. GARBAGE. It seems a recent update to home assistant, or the fact that ‘/dev/mapper/ha2–vg-root’ recently filled up the whole drive to 100% for no reason, I’m not sure which, renamed every single entity. Most of my automation are now screwed. I realize of course that this isn’t a home assistant problem and probably caused by zwave or openzwave. Before I rip out everything and sell it all has a…

This wasn’t it but is similar:

Unsolicited opinion/perspective

I had 4 Vera’s deployed, down to 1. Looking forward to getting rid of it. Buggy, crashes, poor support, 1-2 updates per year. Aeotec Z-Stick works good for me (but that is NOT an endorsement of all of their devices). I think Vera’s best times are in the past…

Also this might be useful:

Using a Vera Edge as a network-attached zwave device (skipping the vera software)

I have a few Vera’s lying around and I wanted to migrate one to home assistant, and instead of going the tedious way of adding again all my zwave devices to a zwave stick, I decided to try and make a zwave-to-tcp device out of the controller, and connect home assistant to it. Data path: zwave chip - ser2net - tcp port - ... ethernet ... - socat - serial device - home assistant And guess what? It works great! And only uses 18 mb of ram out of 128 on my edge and barely uses any cpu - and i pr…

[Canedje]

Yesss.
This looks like the answer!!
Thanks a lot

I still don’t know how to connect, to add devices and how to control from HA but I will digg into it.

[tom_l]

You use this integration:

Vera

[Canedje]

Thanks again!!
I just did found that.
And then use just the same commands in node red with the right Id nr to execute commands as I do now?

[tom_l]

I know nothing about node red but you will have entities in home assistant for your devices, just like before.

[Canedje]

Thanks I will order a VERA very soon.

[keith-michael]

Forum alerted me that an old thread of mine was mentioned. Thought i would let you know my situation now. The Vera platform does some things better but in the end I returned to usb stick. The usb stick just performs better for me. And I know how to use HA/Zwave better then I did before.

I STILL use Vera though - I have a detached garage with network connection. Zwave can reach the house from the garage but there is a lot of latency. So, I use the Vera as a zwave hub in my garage which talks to HA over TCP.

[keith-michael]

if you want a used one let me know! i put one in my garage and have second i don’t use anymore. will let it go for cheap.

[Canedje]

Thanks for your reaction.
Funny your back to the usb dongle.
I just started with the Vera yesterday and did bring over one Neo wallplug for a test.
So thanks for the offer
My idea is to split up my meshnetwork to Vera and the dongle.
I wonder what you did to get back to the dongle. I’m trying for 3 weeks now without succeeding to get a stable zwave, so I decided to go to Vera for a part.
Some devices only reacting in 20seconds or so, so suddenly they are runnig smooth. It’s driving me crazy. And can not find any strange thing.

A question: Straight from the dongle you have a lot off entities. From vera just one to switch the device.
In an other threat I did ask the next question:
Maybe you now how to handle.
I’m working in node RED:
My zwave with a dongle straight to HA was giving bad reliability, so I decided to order a VeraEdge as zwave hub.
I installed it and for test I paired a Neo coolcam wallplug.
It is vissible into HA and can control it by nodeRED so the basics are working.
If I connect a neo coolcam plug straight to HA I do have a lot of entities to act with. Also energie for example.
From Vera devices I only see one entity switch on and off the plug, no sensors.

I like to have the possibility to switch on energy usage.
At the tile on the overview I do see the energy changing. How to check on this in nodeRED without having the sensor entitie “power usage”?
I learned that it is a “state”, but how to read the state inthis case from:
switch.neo_10_kerst_raam_4
the state is named:
current_power_w

[kostya (Konstantin)]

Just a thought on the alternative solution: there is a project called zwave2mqtt by OpenZwave - it could potentially allow running several zwave dongles around the house and have all the devices integrated into HA via mqtt discovery. I don’t own any zwave devices but I’m running similar config with zigbee2mqtt and tested having several instances of it with several dongles integrated into HA and it worked great!

[petro]

@kostya

zwave2mqtt by OpenZwave

this platform will be officially dead in the future. qt-openzwave is the future and similar to zwave2mqtt.

Also, I have 90 devices currently in my zwave. No issues what so ever. Not sure why @tom_l or @Canedje are having problems.

EDIT2: The only time i’ve noticed slowdowns on my zwave network are when a single device is not responding. For example, If I ‘turn off all the lights’ and one light doesn’t respond after the turn off, then you’ll get slowness on the next action. If you have a lot of shit devices, I could see this happening all the time.

[Canedje]

How is it possible.
I realy don’t know what is causing my problem.
I only have 30 devices(19 meshnetwork devices and 11 battery devices) So if 90 devices is working fine I realy wondering.
I’m migraiting from a Homey with exactly the same devices.
At Homey everything worked fine.

I only have one unknown node I can not get rid of.
(any ideas how to remove an unknown node?)

Indeed there are some devices reacting very slow, which didn’t at Homey.
I think I all have qualfied good devices: Fibaro and Neo Coolcam.
But I wil investigate further

[petro]

@Canedje

devices reacting very slow,

What’s your definition of slow?

@Canedje

I only have one unknown node I can not get rid of.
(any ideas how to remove an unknown node?)

there’s a process on the zwave page that shows you how to remove dead nodes.

[Canedje]

The same devices sometimes react within 1 seconde (very fast).
But then it could be at the next trigger it will take about 15 to 20 seconds
Thanks for the link
I will have a look at it

EDIT:

I just removed the unknown node.
After reboot, the node is gone, but also two other nodes suddenly show: dead nodes?
One off them was always reacting very slow.

I hope heal network helps these nodes will be helping the reliability.
I will try tonight

EDIT2:

Uhmmmm. after a second reboot, the unknown node is back again??
I’m not able to remove the unknown node.
I tried severall times without succes

[Canedje]

I’m running now VeraEdge, beside the Zwave.me USB (nice to be able to use 2 zwave systems beside each other)
Until now it is working nice and reliable.
I did pair 12 devices from the USB to Vera. I tried to keep 2 goed network meshes.
Thats enough to get a reliable network, so I’m happy.
I still like to know why it is not reliable.
So I will do some experientals to try.
any tips what or how to test?