Have completely rebuilt my Z-wave network from scratch over the last week and had everything working.
I was looking at adding the battery package from the forums to monitor all the batteries.
I added that and BOOM all my Z-wave devices are gone!!! I removed all the changes and restarted and Z-wave is still just showing the controller and an UNKNOWN node 002.
I’m losing faith with HA and Z-Wave at this point…this is the third time this has happened to me now.
I can see lots of nodes in the Z-Wave logs but they don’t seem to be recognised by HA.
Latest OZWLog.txt is available - not sure how to attach it to this post???
Thinking about this I also may have started HOMEKIT integration for the first time since the rebuild - also removed that with no effect.
This happened to me with a bad/broken zwave stick (it forgot devices or all of them, weird random delays or devices that appeared to be something else than they were). Since replacing it I’ve had no more issues for 2+ years…
Not sure its the stick - In the OZW log I can see lots (all) the nodes checking in when I start the network and I can see events coming through. Its more like they are not getting shared/picked up by HA
I have made a similar experience with my z-wave network. My Aeotech USB stick needed a factory reset and I had to re-add all of my devices. Now, everything works fine. The root cause was most likely that I “forgot” to exclude devices which I added and plugged out later on (e.g. wall switches). I made this mistake with a lot of devices, including light bulbs, switches, roller shutters, dimmers, etc., mainly for testing reasons. As with your case, this must have piled up the number of z-wave devices stored in the controller stick which eventually created many errors in the logs, unsuccessful boot up (no zwave devices detected in HA), and so on.
I’ve got the same issue after restarting a lot of times in a row due to config debugging. Although most of my devices re-appeared while trying some more. Unfortunately I don’t have a clue what made them be recognized again. Like with cannfoddr my OZW_Log.txt shows activity on all the nodes while HA seems to ignore some. All that happened while upgrading to some 0.85.0.dev0 version (I currently can’t use releases because I’m working on a contribution for numato usb gpio boards which I am already using). I guess I need to dig a bit into the zwave component to understand more what’s happening.
My family doesn’t like me taking care of home automation on Christmas though…
I like the theory on startups - I am going to restrict mine to once a day.
I am wondering if there is a way - like Homekit to start Z-Wave in a disabled state while I am debugging other things and then re-enabling it when I am ready.
I think someone needs to look into the whole Z-Wave restart missing devices thing. I think I have exhausted the Z-Wave network as a cause. I have lots of mains powered nodes and repeaters - in fact last time it was a mains powered repeater that hung (Node 002).
I’ve never had to be cautious about HA restarts before but I am now!
I am using the Aeon Z-stick and has encountered a similar problem with my Z-wave entities lately. I have 30+ different nodes and despite several hassio restarts, the only ones recognized by the system are the Z-stick itself, one Fibaro motion sensor and an “uknown node 18”. I happen to have two different Z-sticks and my spare stick has been backed up with most of the nodes a while back. Plugging that stick into my RPi 3 with hass.io made no difference. Only a few of the nodes show up in HA.
I sort have have all the Z-Wave working now - 17 nodes plus the controller. For now I am just going to avoid restarts until someone can shed some light on why restarts are killing Z-Wave devices.
I can live with the renaming for now but the disappearing nodes is a killer.
I wish there was a button to do just this… However my experience is that Z-Wave discovery in HA only ever seems to happen during association. With all my failures the OZWLog.txt shows devices happily conversing with the controller but HA refuses to see them.
I rebuilt my network a couple days ago and found that it dropped a lot of battery devices on reboot. This was after adding quite a few nodes in a row, so when I redid it I added one at a time making sure all the entities of the node appeared and rebooted between each device being added and it seemed to do the trick. Nothing dropped…
Yesterday, I stopped HA and deleted all zwave entries from the core.* files in the .history folder. I also deleted the zwcfg*.xml file and then started HA again. After a few restarts, I could see the network slowly building up again, but not all of my zwave entities came back. So, I copied back a previous zwcfg*.xml file and restarted again. After about 3-4 hours, my mesh seemed to have stabilized, showing the following graph:
I am actually considering to scrap my entire zwave network, reset my stick and start over. It seems impossible to remove nodes that are not reliable. My zwave mesh has turned into a zwave “mess”. It would be nice if there was better functionality in HA to handle zwave entities. I am afraid, though, that if I reset my z-stick and start over, many zwave will not be willing to be included again unless they have first been excluded from its “former home”, which turns out to be extremely difficult to accomplish.
I did try to exclude as many devices as I could before resetting the stick. But for all devices, I could also simply reset them and then include them again no problem. It fixed my instability issues, my z-wave network is in good shape again.
Only missing thing in the linked steps is you also have to clean out the entity registry file.
Thanks, I will probably do that soon! I have some entities (Qubino, Fibaro, Philiotech) that are built in behind wall switches etc., that are a little bit trickier to reset, though. Have been struggling with these in my current repair efforts. As a crappy zwave network is not an option, I guess I will just have to bite the bullet and try a fresh start following the steps you reference.
Yes, I finally manage to include a number of those as well. I am rebuilding my zwave network slowly now, starting with only powered entities saving the battery ones for later.
I have had a couple of hickups during my first 7 inclusions in the way that HA doesn’t recognize any zwave entities (just showing empty in the zwave config). So far, these “blind spots” have been remedied by a "hassio host reboot".
Unfortunately, this confirms that zwave under HA is rather “wonky” at times.
I had to rebuild my zwave network over the weekend after I realised that a repeater had traded node identity with a switch. This lead to massive OZW_Log.txt files due to node INFO spam and some non-functioning automations ; my working theory was that this was the result of multiple restarts without allowing time for OZW to stop correctly.
