I have had my frustrations as well. After switching out most of my 433 MHz network from Telldus to HA and Z-wave, I almost have nightmares from debugging and staring at the OZW log the last weeks
Currently I have problems with Aontec dimmers and NorthQ power reader. Aeotec dimmers worked fine for a couple of months, but then it was just random (Z-wave issue - HA sending value 0). There is a thread about the NorthQ Power Reader, but I haven’t had the time to debug it yet (NorthQ NQ-92021 Power Reader).
I currently have 36 Z-wave devices. I have not yet noticed any large delays in my network. Looking at the log, It can be 10-20 seconds between a device-update on idle, so there is some breathing-room - but when I try to dim my Nexa dimmer it generates 713 lines in the OZW log, so I think there is something weird going on.
My conclusion is that using HA and Z-wave without the OZW log, is like using a rock instead of an hammer when building a house at this moment This is mostly because missing feedback in the GUI and a lot of restarts.
Im reassured to read that more people face problems with zwave . I’m partially thinking to stop home assistant entirely but then I think after spending 100 of hours and more than 1000€ for all my stuff I think no…I must continue.
I have those remotec zwave ac ir device and even after using always listening mode they appear dead or just don’t react.nice at this period of the year.
I recently bought Intel nuc and I’ll setup home assistant with all automation and components from scratch.also zwave.
I hope after restarting with reset devices.empty files and fresh system it will work. I hope so as I also built my home security with zwave.
Problems with mixed non secured and secured (zwave plus) network should really not be a problem but I read those often here.
Well. I’ll come back here with a 100% fresh installed home assistant and reset zwave network/devices and will report back.
Till then I have to accept that my sh**** remotec devices won’t work as needed.pity for those extraordinary prices for zwave.80€ for one device. Sometimes I think zwave is more like for devs and play kids than serious devices.even those Chinese Xiaomi stuff works better costs 10% of the zwave price and even looks better.
We will see the future for my zwave network here.if not u can buy all my stuff on eBay the next upcoming weeks
Point 6 (and Ad6) needs to be addressed. It’s what causes timeouts in my network. Almost everytime I see the controller waiting for something it’s those checks that have piled up.
Well, I finally gave up.
Zwave on Home Assistant is just horribly unreliable, and impossible to troubleshoot in any meaningful way.
I’m still using home assistant, but I’ve offloaded my zwave network to a Vera controller that connects in to Home Assistant. Immediate impressions:
Network is MUCH faster, responds nearly instantaneously to commands
Network is MUCH more reliable, responds to commands every single time
Easier to work with, Devices include or exclude first try every time.
As I go on, I’m finding that Home Assistant has amazing core functionality, unrivalled by any other product I’ve seen. But there is a lot of focus on “new and shiny” and not so much on fast and reliable. For my next task I’m looking at moving my GPIOs off of home assistant to something that registers the correct state every time and can handle debounce properly without getting stuck on the wrong state.
Thanks for replying so quickly to my comment. I almost thought as much, because the unstable nature of Z-Wave in HA couldn’t be representative of z-wave as a whole. If it were, no one would buy it.
I’m placing my hopes on the latest blog article.
Better Z-Wave. Our current integration has room for improvement. The owner of Z-Wave has announced a public SDK, which we should explore to integrate with Home Assistant.
I will pay for HA cloud if they fix the z-wave issues because my whole house relies on z-wave.
I’m a bit surprised. Stumbled on this post and have z-wave via Home Assistant running for more than a year now. Best combo ever. I have about 29 devices and although somethings feel spartan… I wouldn’t say unreliable.
I’m using the aeotec z-stick gen 5.
Perhaps there is something different with types of controllers?
These are helpful observations and will hopefully help some others debig what’s going on with their networks.
However, do you remember what you paid for HomeAssistant and for OpenZWave? Probably nothing. I’m not knocking the amazing contributions of the people who volunteer to commit to projects like OpenZWave, but they are volunteers. If you want something that’s much more stable, why not purchase a solution like HomeSeer.
I started with OpenZWave, got frustrated and went to HomeSeer. I went back to OpenZWave because I thought there were improvements and I’m a developer at heart. OpenZWave gave me the ability to have much more control over the application. But now I’m back to HomeSeer I think once and for all because I value stability more than flexibility.
Like many other decisions, you do a cost/benefit analysis and decide what’s more important to you.
I have only recently started with Z-Wave on Home Assistant and have also had issues with it being flakey or unreliable.
The entity renaming issue hasn’t hit me, but issues with randomly freezing and slow responses due to the way Z-wave is handled definitely have.
I migrated from Openhab (also free and opensource) because the Java scripting used in that was a little technical for me, but I have found I have had to put a lot more time into ZWave trouble shooting with OZW and HA.
Issues, such as some devices (ZXT-120 in particular) not responding in OZW, yet respond perfectly in OpenHab have made this a bit frustrating.
I am going to take the Vera route to control ZWave until OZW in HA is more reliable. I don’t like extra hubs, but reliability is stability is key in anything to do with home automation.
With that said, I love Home Assistant so far and appreciate all the work that is put into it.
I also understand, as @swmcdonnell pointed out, it is free. Don’t take anything said as an attack, more observations, and a little frustration. I am not looking for instant fixes. These are just accounts of my frustrations with some bugs that currently exist.
It’s frustrating to hear all the people chime in and say they have no issues and most of them use the Aeotec Z-Stick as well. That was the reason I bought that device, it seemed to be the best supported and best reviewed by HA users. In addition to everything outlined in the OP I also have an issue where every time HA is restarted a different mix of Z-Wave devices are “Entity Not Available.” After a few more restarts eventually I can get it where all devices show up, but not much else has changed besides the # of reboots. The OZW Log shows the same type of chatter each time it boots up. Occasionally I do see “Z-Wave not ready after 300 seconds, continuing anyway” in the HA logs itself, but again OZW Log shows normal Network chatter. I’m not sure what makes it ready versus not ready… just a few more restarts of HA and it’ll eventually consider itself ready.
It’s nice to hear that there’s the possibility of starting from scratch with a different Z-Wave implementation (in lieu of OZW) but in my laymen’s perspective, the issue is not with OZW. When I fire up OZWCP, all of the devices are always ready and happy, respond instantly to commands, and instantly become aware of manual device changes.
I believe the issue is likely related to the OZW Python Wrapper. It seems to be a little less than ideal.
It will be good to have a ZWave revamp using the new public SDK.
I have 2x VeraEdge and 2xVeraPlus, one is currently interfaced by HA, along with a ZStick Gen5.
Have not pushed ZWave via ZStick on HA very hard yet, but the HA/Vera integration is solid; apparently more solid than Vera itself (I would not use Very any more than necessary for anything). In my case, I’ll probably have to keep Vera around (sigh) until HA’s ZWave integration get a serious push. OpenHab does seem to give ZWave more effort than HA.
Kind of similar to Lutron RA2 support.
Have anybody considered organizing a user/donor “fund” to encourage/pay for desirable dev efforts? I think (a lot?) of users would contribute to getting specific things moving as fast as possible. I am most appreciative of the effort put forth by all the volunteers, is that kind of fund compatible with the HA community?
I really like HA, if the current effort is kept up, I think HA will go a very long way.
@joost, thanks for sharing this! Although it took me some time to stumble on your post and many hours of frustration with zwave and HA, your solution Ad 1 and Ad 5 have fixed a lot in my setup so far. I’ll definitely be checking the others. Just wanted to say THANKS for sharing!
I am running Hassbian with Aeotec Gen 5 stick and many Fibaro switches, dimmers and sensors. I saw many timeouts and had some really strange behaviour when turning switches on and off. Delays, not reacting… etc. Yesterday I have made some changes and all seems to be pretty snappy… Let’s hope it stays like that!
