I noticed the older switches start to disappear from stores and the new ones on Amazon here. Does anyone know, do the new “plus” switches support instant updating? I love my GE switches but it drives me nuts they don’t update. If this has been resolved I’ll be darn happy about it and may be swapping out some switches soon. 
I’m not sure what you mean about instant updating. I will say this, the new Fan module is not supported yet. I ended up replacing mine with just a standard GE smart switch so I could get my automations back. It’s controlling a bathroom exhaust fan, so the standard GE smart switch isn’t an issue since I don’t need a dimmer.
If you are talking about showing up instantly in HA, I think that was only a problem with the dimmers in the past, the standard switches, always worked quickly unless you were going through wink or some other cloud based solution. If I’m off base, let me know and I’ll try to give a better answer.
Hello. I mean manually using the switch sends an instant update signal to the zwave system, thus updating Hass instantly instead of relying on polling. This is a known issue with ge switches. Thanks.
Didn’t know that, never paid attention to it. My automations aren’t that time sensitive. I just tried on of mine though, and HA updated within maybe 2 seconds on the outside, could have been less. But I don’t know if that’s an old switch or a new switch. Are you going straight to HA with HA managing the Z-wave interface or are you using wink or some other hub in between?
Home Assistant is managing the zwave using the aeotec usb stick. I notice issues when switching lights on/off using the web interface, or manually adjusting the switches. It’s pretty annoying when you’re at a different location and don’t know if the light is on or off.
What release of HA are you on? I’m not seeing any of those issues, especially once I went away from Wink and straight to HA. With that said, immediately after a restart of the app, it does take a while to load up the zwave network, and during that time (several minutes), it’s almost unresponsive. But once the zwave network gets done reporting in, everything is nice and quick.
I had a sd card fail so just rebuilt using aio installer this past weekend. .48 I believe?
how long of a delay between switching something on in HA do you have before the light turns on in the real world? And just to make sure we are talking apples to apples, we are talking about the GE Switches, not the GE Dimmers. And how long of a delay from when you turn something on manually to when it shows in HA?
But back to the original point, I have no idea if the problem is fixed in the new switches.
He’s talking about a known issue with the GE switches. When you make a change to the switch (whether or not it’s in HASS or at the physical switch), the HASS status doesn’t always correctly reflect the status of the switch until it’s polled again. This is especially true on dimmer switches, as they have a fade on/off time. HASS sees a change in the status of the switch and retrieves that status. The problem is that the switch is still in the middle of the fading, so the status of the switch at that exact time is 68%, but the actual status is that the light is fading from on to off (or vice versa).
To work around this issue, I have set my GE switches to delay 3 seconds before being polled. This way HASS always has the correct status (albeit 3 seconds later than when the change took place). You do this in your Z-Wave Device Config file. Here’s an example of my bedroom fan (but all the switches are the same):
fan.bedroom_fan_level:
ignored: false
polling_intensity: 1
refresh_value: 2
delay: 3
I would seriously doubt that this issue is fixed in the new switches, as the fade time is still present. The only exception would be if GE put the delay in their firmware in the switch so that it didn’t send out a Z-Wave status update until the transition is completed.
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That’s why I was clarifying whether we were talking about the switches or the dimmers. The switches show up immediately (less than 2 seconds) for me. The dimmers show the same behavior you are talking about. I think though that in the configuration of the switch, you can set the dim speed. That might help some.
I just set the z-wave command dim rate on my office lights which are a GE Zwave dimmer. I set it to 1 which means that every 10 ms the level will change. Then I turned it to full brightness and turned if off. It turned off in about 2 seconds.
I’m not using the dimmer switches, just standard ones model 12727. Sorry for not clarifying sooner. My hope was the zwave plus ones would function like some of the other manufacturers new switches that update the zwave hub immediately.
Ok, then back to my question, how long do they take to update?
Not sure if 2 is valid for refresh_value. That was a true/false in the code when I looked.
Of course all my testing now is working perfectly on mobile and manual switching. Ha.
I believe I found my answer here.
Basically;
Z-Wave Plus extended features include:
Significant increased range - up to 150m (clear air)
50% improvement in battery life
250% more bandwidth
Three F channels for improved noise immunity and higher bandwidth
New Plug-n-Play Network-wide Inclusion feature
Improved self-healing and fault tolerance with Explorer Frame feature
Standardised method for Over the Air firmware updates (OTA)
Improved product information capture for product certification database
Confirmed. From the docs:
refresh_value (Optional): Enable refreshing of the node value. Only the light component uses this. Defaults to False.
Ok, I have a “dead node” on my zwave switches. I believe that’s causing it to not update properly. Now to figure out how to fix that!
Ok well, my issue was resolved by removing the devices from the aeotec usb stick and readding them. Interesting. I hope that doesn’t need to happen again any time soon!