As far as I know, HA doesn’t let us know when a Z-Wave node unexpectedly goes dead and cannot be communicated anymore. We could have dead nodes for many different reasons:
- dead battery (I just had a Fibaro door sensor which stopped working while the last reported battery level was still at 61%, so alerts based on battery level alone are not enough)
- damage by environment (especially outdoors)
- vandalism
- changes in neighbouring radio traffic causing connection problems
- etc
Consquences might be:
- no notification for water leakage or fire alarm
- door lock stops working while you don’t happen to have a physical key with you
- sensors working as part of a burglar alarm fail to send notifications
- automations depending on dead nodes might have unexpected results
- sensors working to collect long time statistics fail to produce data
- etc
Some of these can be worked around by creating alarms based on expected trigger intervals - if for example a door sensor hasn’t reported anything in days and we know for sure the door is used every day. But sensors which trigger with uneven/unpredictable intervals cannot be detected like this, not to mention automatic monitoring would be much easier.
Automation systems shouldn’t require us to check every day if its components are still working, so I humbly hope that HA would implement this feature in the future 