I’m sorry if this is common knowledge or I just somehow missed it in reading as much as I can on Z-Wave or posted anywhere else in the Z-Wave section. If a node has polling enabled and it goes dead for any reason, but then gets marked as “Ready”, the network will freeze and halt all communication in/out until either the timeout period is reached or the node sends back a valid response.
A couple months ago I moved. I have only been able to re-install some of my Z-Wave network devices. The ones I have not reinstalled are all mains powered standard Z-Wave devices, not gen 5 or Z-Wave+ devices. Before this weekend, these missing devices would be marked as “Dead” on the network and life would go on. However, over the weekend 1 device at a time, after a restart of HA for other reasons, would start showing up as “Ready” yet the device very clearly was not powered so therefore had no way of reporting to the controller. As soon as my one device that had polling enabled (interval of every 30 seconds), the network would freeze. The lights on the controller would stop blinking either staying stuck on a color or off. All communication with any other devices stopped as well and I could not get power reporting updates or control any of my outlets. When the timeout period was reached, the lights would start blinking again very rapidly indicating all the queued messages and traffic while the network was halted then go back to normal until the next polling interval.
I spun up a docker container for OpenZwave and confirmed the same behavior there, so this is not a HA issue, rather a quirk of Z-Wave itself. If I spun up a container for OpenZwave but did not link my config file and forced it to rebuild the config file, I did not have these issues, but seemingly random nodes would be marked as “Dead” but in fact they are not and just needed to be interacted with and they go back to “Ready”.
Yes I know I could just remove the dead nodes from the network and add them again later. But I’m moving again in 6-8 months and I know I will be using all of the nodes again, and my initial solution of just letting them sit marked as “Dead” was working. So now I’m trying to figure out why the devices are being marked as “Ready” even though they should be “Dead” and why other good nodes are being marked as “Dead”.