I am noticing with the last couple of upgrades that I am seeing more dead nodes after restarting HA. It started (well that’s when I noticed it) with the upgrade to 0.55. At first, it was just my Aeotec Multisensors. They would report dead until they detected motion, then they would be fine. Then with the upgrade to 55.1 I noticed my Schlage door locks would report dead and it would be random ones. I could go punch in an unlock code and it would be fine after that. Now with the upgrade to 0.56 I am seeing electrical outlets reporting dead. I am also occasionally seeing some of my ZWave light switches being reported as on when they clearly are not.
When I noticed this at the upgrade to 0.55 I blew it off because I wanted to go through my configuration to make sure something had not randomly changed. Plus I wanted to add a few automations I had been putting off, etc. Well, all of that is done. Then came the 0.56 release. I thought maybe it was just something quirky with 0.55 and I went ahead and upgraded. Now, the dead nodes seem to be a bit worse and in addition to that, the startup time is much slower.
When I restarted HA prior to 0.56, from the time HA started to when it finished polling all the devices was usually around three to four minutes. Now, with the 0.56 upgrade, it is easily double that.
Has anyone else been seeing behavior like this? If so, is there anything I can check or perhaps some kind of fix. My Schlage locks have never had any issues so them randomly reporting dead is particularly puzzling.
Dead Z-Wave nodes often indicate communication problems (that or the devices having lost power, or having locked up). I’d suggest you build yourself a connection graph using this post, and post the results here.
My experience is that one plasterboard wall is generally not a problem for Z-Wave, but two is where it starts to get hit and miss, and three requires a lot of care (and luck). Brick walls are obviously worse, and other obstructions can be an issue.
Are you able to lay out your floorplan and where your devices are?
I can try and get that done. I have a powered device in just about every room. In fact, I can only think of one room in the house right now that does not have some sort of powered device that serves as a repeater. The only devices I see with less than 10 neighbors are two of my door locks but those two still have a few neighbors, just not as many as other devices on the network.
I am in a brick house, but no internal brick walls.
I will see if I can get the connection graph done and do a floorplan. Thanks for replying @Tinkerer.
It seems around 55 the zwave stack became more finicky. I think this is when they upgraded the python-openzwave component.
I ended up taking the devices it was not happy with (they were ones that had support updated in the new openzwave - typically “unknown” devices prior), shutting down HA, manually removing from the zwcfg*.xml file, restarting HA, updating the device names removed, restarting HA again for those names to be active and all is good again.
I am not sure if it was at fault or not, but I ‘think’ I found the issue. I had moved my network key to the zwave section of the configuration.yaml file and forgot to comment it out in the options.xml file. Since doing that, the only thing that shows up dead are my Aeotech MultiSensors and they eventually respond. I have not seen my locks or any other device show up as dead since.
