For reference, I just went through the same.
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?
I’m using an Aeotec Z-Wave Gen5.
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.
Consider this a +1 for the OP’s issues… I opened a different thread hoping to start fresh, but no replies yet:
https://community.home-assistant.io/t/status-not-updating-seems-to-be-getting-worse/85790/5
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.
There is talk behind the scenes in how to best move forward.
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Hi, which Vera controller are you using?
Any of them should do, I went with the verasecure because I wanted to play with the 2gig stuff. But even the Edge should do if all you want is zwave.
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.
I put up a pull request to address #6, but I’m convinced it actually stops the double poll after turning off a dimmer. The log message actually comes from OpenZWave: https://github.com/OpenZWave/open-zwave/blob/88a9e07b2fd60dc0a43cd36ac142f7bcf2129813/cpp/src/Manager.cpp#L2933
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@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!
What changes did you do?
Ive had nothing but trouble, given up for now. I’ll get back to it later I think.
The main change that seems to be working for me is: when I added the devices into zwave, I used the “add node” option and not the “add secure node”. I’m still experimenting with editing the zwave cache file, but so far, seems for my situation to be the secure chatter affecting the response of my system.
This is a really great write up. My experience with zwave is mostly positive. I have one enerwave device that refuses to work correctly anymore, but the rest of my 20 something devices are mostly great and respond instantaneously. I’ll definitely be using the log analyzer to see what improvements I can make! I never knew it existed.
Some less important issues are: I have two aeotec multisensor 6s that don’t update at the same speed even though they are set identically from what I can tell. I have a Fibaro wall plug that didn’t create an entity in HA to monitor total power like the other identical Fibraro wall plug created. Changing parameters for devices is also a hassle, but thankfully I usually don’t need to.
I have a question, how do you run your own instance of OpenZwave with HA? I have it set up with OpenZwave Control Panel (although it’s been a while since I used it), is it a similar set up? Not sure where in HA I point it to own instance.
I’m back on the OpenZwave instance that comes with HA for some time now. But from my earlier notes (not sure how relevant today, but maybe good starting point):
cd /home/joost/homeassistant
source bin/activate
export LOCAL_OPENZWAVE=/home/joost/openzwave/open-zwave
pip uninstall -y python_openzwave
pip install python-openzwave --no-cache-dir --upgrade --force-reinstall --install-option="--flavor=dev" --no-deps
And to check which OpenZwave library is loaded:
lsof -P -T -p <PID> | grep zwave
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