I have a pretty robust Z-wave network made up of 700- & 800-series devices, as well as some legacy devices that I can’t find a current replacement for (Trane thermostat, for instance). 69 devices in total.
I have a two devices on the geographical fringe of my network that drop out frequently enough to be annoying… once or twice a week. Those ones are Jasco and Zooz switches. They’re two of probably six or seven devices in outbuildings that otherwise work well and route through a powered repeater in the garage. If I Rebuild Routes for those, they’ll start responding and work pretty much instantly. What’s odd is, they’re both in gang boxes with other identical Z-wave switches that are rock solid… for instance, I have two Zooz ZEN21 in one box, only one of which is troublesome. Those are the most-recently-installed switches, put in about a month ago in a four year-old network built up over time.
I’m using Zwave JS UI v3.17.0. The best answer is probably to figure out why these nodes are dropping and address that… but I’m wondering if there’s a way to trigger an automation that rebuilds the routes/heal the network instead.
You won’t be able to automate rebuilding routes in HA, there’s no feature to do so. It is not provided because for many users the process can make their network worse. It’s something you would usually do sparingly, most often when including new nodes or physically relocating existing ones.
Contrary to popular belief, this process does not magically make the mesh better. If devices have a physically bad connection, assigning new routes will not help. In fact, it can make the situation worse by deleting routes that were found to be working and assigning other bad routes.
Due to this, we’re often faced with feature requests for automatically and regularly performing a network heal. While this is certainly doable, it’s absolutely not a good idea.
That’s (probably) the reason why Home Assistant doesn’t support it via automation. If you really want to automate it, you’ll either need to dig into using the websocket API, or MQTT.
I’d suggest going through the “first steps” troubleshooting. The last step includes some notes about manually assigning routes, which might work better for you if it’s just these two devices. Assigning routes is possible in ZUI’s network map. https://zwave-js.github.io/node-zwave-js/#/troubleshooting/first-steps
Thank you—I recall reading while researching this that manually assigning routes could lead to problems with future network heals; is there any truth to that?
Asked another way: are there any downsides to manually-assigning routes? I see some that could easily be improved (e.g., 4 hops to go 8 feet when there are like 10 line-powered Z-wave devices within 8 feet of the controller).
My network is 85% line-powered. Like I said, I do have a repeater/range extender, and I think it actually may be the Aeotec.
What throws me is that I don’t have issues with identical switches in the same gang boxes.
I’m going to start by looking at my reporting intervals to see if I can make any improvement there, and then check for S0-secured devices as suggested in the links above.
I switch from trane to Honeywell T6. I like honeywell better
I doesn’t matter how many ac devices you have, if units are far away you must put extender to bridge the distance.
In my case I had fdevices too far away and their bad tx/rx were crashing my network. I eventually removed them and setup pi running ZwavejsUI in docker just for these nodes. A single extender couldn’t bride the distance so seperat network was best
In another case although all my light/fan switches are AC I had devices in concrete/metal room where I literraly must place Wi-Fi AP in adjoining room since area is so signal unfriendly. In this case extender placed close to door helped bride network.
Point being environment matters and in both theses case command dropped TX/RX was extremely high before solution was found. Also sometimes repeater is good fix and sometimes its useless but its placement is important
That aeotech extender has better reception/transmit than my GE/Jasco switches
I pi running zwavejs or esp device may be best. When you start chaining extenders it begins to look real hacky and fragile. Best to use a real solution.
Does that device really need to be zwave?
If multiple devices definitely put another network dedicated to these devices at edge
Possibly. I have no ESP32 devices yet. It’s currently controlling a pool heater.
I’ve removed all periodic power reporting, and today I’ll investigate moving my only two S0 devices to S2. These are incremental changes that might make a difference, I’ll have to see.
Well, in the years I’ve been using it, that legacy thermostat has never caused me issues. What I don’t know is whether having it in my network is slowing things down.
I’ve getting dropped packets in the more distant devices… though, it’s only one at a time that has problems. Picture three buildings in a line; sometimes a device (always the same switch) in the middle building will drop, while the other four or five devices in that same building have no problems, and the devices in the farthest building still work. And sometimes it’s a device in that farthest building that drops while everything else works.
I’m not opposed to setting up a separate Z-wave network. I have an RPi I could use, and I’d just need a dongle. But I have no idea about setting it up. Any resources you know of would be helpful. And… in this case, Ethernet is impossible. I have decent WiFi signal to the middle building.
Install Raspbian
Install ZwavejsUI in docker
Connect devices to new zwave network
In your main HA devices and services setup another zwave integration using the pi’s ip
You could setup the pi with HAOS but I’m honestly not sure if you could simply connect to the pi’s ip to get it into your main HA instance
Docker compose is best. It’ll make upgrade of zwavejsui easier when needed.
I continue on, installing Zwave JS UI… and it seems to work fine. I can edit docker-compose.yml; but I can’t get to the web UI, and I see no evidence that the container is starting even after a reboot:
I flashed Raspberry Pi OS 64-bit from the official imager menu. I’m using a RPi 3B+.
I’ll start from scratch and look for that.
The yml file? Here it is:
version: '3.7'
services:
zwave-js-ui:
container_name: zwave-js-ui
image: zwavejs/zwave-js-ui:latest
restart: always
tty: true
stop_signal: SIGINT
environment:
- SESSION_SECRET=mysupersecretkey
# Uncomment if you want logs time and dates to match your timezone instead of UTC
# Available at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tz_database_time_zones
#- TZ=America/New_York
networks:
- zwave
devices:
# Do not use /dev/ttyUSBX serial devices, as those mappings can change over time.
# Instead, use the /dev/serial/by-id/X serial device for your Z-Wave stick.
- '/dev/serial/by-id/insert_stick_reference_here:/dev/zwave'
volumes:
- zwave-config:/usr/src/app/store
ports:
- '8091:8091' # port for web interface
- '3000:3000' # port for Z-Wave JS websocket server
networks:
zwave:
volumes:
zwave-config:
name: zwave-config
This is the default one I pulled from here… I changed port #s but it’s otherwise the same.
They’re 100% outdated. I didn’t use MQTT, and instead pointed to the Zwave JS UI git.
From what I’m seeing here… maybe I need to start with the 32-bit OS?
Is this what you literally have now?
You need to identify the location of the zwave stick and input it instead of the generic text
There isn’t a problem with the python install. The problem was the guide really. Guides get old and provide bad info a lot of times. Always read the real docs and understand the goal before using someone else’s bad suggestion. That includes those I’m providing read the docs
No, I have my USB stick path in there… I had already restarted the re-installation and just pasted from the template.
My docker installation is failing now! Following the docs here, and I get to installing the docker packages and I get this:
E: Package 'docker-ce' has no installation candidate
E: Package 'docker-ce-cli' has no installation candidate
E: Unable to locate package containerd.io
E: Couldn't find any package by glob 'containerd.io'
E: Couldn't find any package by regex 'containerd.io'
E: Unable to locate package docker-buildx-plugin
E: Unable to locate package docker-compose-plugin
read the docs