Brief overview of the problem I’m trying to solve - I’m trying to establish a true high availability HA setup using HASSIO and running on Proxmox. The last hurdle is removing the hardware ZWave USB stick passthrough to Proxmox, which doesn’t work with high availability.
So someone suggested Zwave2MQTT and I was hoping to get a couple of questions clarified:
Stability - is Zwave2MQTT as stable as native ZW integration in HA? I’ve found ZW to be rock solid so far and stability remains the primary goal.
Decoupling - I’m planning to run Zwave2MQTT on an independent Raspberry Pi to give my ZW network high uptime and availablity and not incur 5-10 minute Home Assistant startup times. Is this assumption/goal correct? I frequently reboot HA as I’m still in the build out/configuration phase but the ZW network does not require frequent reboots.
Transfer of ZW config - by connecting to Zwave2MQTT via a HA plugin, will I retain all my ZWave nodes, settings, node names, etc? I have a 60-node network and do not want to either have to setup/pair everything from scratch or to have re-do my Home Assistant setup in terms of updating all node and entity names and numbers,
updating automations, etc.
I’ll share some of my experiences using ZWave2MQTT for the past 9 months or so (my migration however was from SmartThings to Zwave2MQTT). I’ll also qualify that I don’t use Hassio, and I have built ZWave2MQTT and OpenZwave from source because at the time I started I wanted to use OpenZWave1.6 with ZWave2MQTT and at at that time Zwave2Mqtt-docker (as an alternative to building from source) was using OpenZWave v1.4. That has since changed and now Docker uses version 1.6.
Stability - Have not had any issues to speak of. I recall only once having to restart it because it quit working.
Decoupling - I run ZWave2mqtt on the same machine that I run HA. Even when I reboot the entire machine, HA comes up quickly and I have state topics persisted in MQTT, so HA gets ZWave state information quickly as well from MQTT (while ZWave2mqtt continues coming up and updating status). The other aspect of decoupling to consider is whether or not to use the auto-discovery feature between ZWave2MQTT and HA and how well the auto-discovery works. I have not used this, so I can’t comment on how well it works. Since I only have fewer than 10 nodes, manual config was not a major issue for me, but since you have so many nodes, you may want to get opinions from others on auto-discovery.
Transfer of ZW Config - I have not tried this myself, but it should just work because OpenZWave initially will only need to know what the ZWave network id and node-ids are on the network (which should already be stored on the ZStick) and from there OpenZwave auto-discovers/probes the devices and builds up a cache of information. You’ll probably need to wake up sleepy devices for this too. I should also say that one area I am less certain about is its ability to discover configuration values (other than the default values). I seem to recall at one time or another that it did not.
