Hmmmm. And when I was researching it was all, ādonāt go wifi cause your gonna have 30 things in your house using the wifi and then when you try to stream or use internet you may have problemsā
I donāt get it, 2 wave devices is pretty consistent, 2nd one turns off maybe 1 sec after first.
3 devices still pretty repeatable.
4 devices totally hit and miss. I tried turning off each on as an individual node in node red. Tried listing them all in one node; doesnāt seem to make difference.
This is obviously not a general problem with zwave. If it was, zwave would be completely useless. I have around 40 zwave devices at this point and everything is pretty much instant. My zwave network has changed quite a bit over time and I never experienced any kind of issues with it. Others have considerably larger meshes and donāt experience problems like this either. Blindly switching to Wifi, which comes with its own set of issues, wouldnāt be very smart.
You need to go into the logs and see what goes wrong. With extreme delays like that, it shouldnāt be too hard to see where things start messing up by looking at the timestamps.
My experience is the exact opposite. Itās impossible to generalize things like this, as they depend so much on the individual setup. Device compliance, high vs not-so-high quality components, RF signal strength, wave propagation patterns within your house (zwave and wifi use different frequencies that behave very differently depending on the building materials used in your home) and so many more. Dismissing a technology just because it doesnāt work for you is never good advice.
But regardless of all this, the kind of delays the OP is getting are just outside of anything normal. Thereās clearly an issue somewhere.
Are you really saying that a reaction time of 4 to 15 seconds is considered normal ? Letās be a little realistic here shall we. I get it that you donāt necessarily like and / or have good experiences with zwave and prefer wifi. Fair enough. But if such delays were normal, do you really think that zwave would have had even the slightest chance on this competitive market, not even talking about the thousands of devices available using the protocol ? Rhetorical question, considering itās one of the leading low power home automation connection layers out there.
If you get delays like this with any protocol or physical layer, then something is seriously wrong with your setup.
I too am slowly working through all my zwave stuff and replacing it with wifi. While not on the same level as described by the op, my zwave switches lag way behind my wifi switches running esphome. I have esphome based motion sensors all over my home, the the rooms that are most responsive and almost instant are the ones with esp to esp.
Just an idea here. I never used scenes, but did you try to set these lights in a script ? Not sure if that would make a difference, but itās maybe worth a try. You can then also follow each service call in the logs and see if there is something abnormal there. Also, are you using the builtin OZW or the new āexperimentalā 1.6 component ?
As a real world reference here, I just did some timing here on my system. I have a script that does something very similar to what your scene does. I have 5 Qubino ZMNHJD modules (theyāre for heating control, but essentially operate like dimmers from the point of view of HA) that are set to a certain light level, one after the other in a script. I just call the light.turn_on service 5 times in a row. Really basic stuff. All the modules turn to the requested mode pretty much instantly as I push the button, there is no visible delay.
This is on a Raspberry Pi with an Aeotec Gen5 Z Stick and the builtin OZW 1.4 integration.
Yeah I wish someone had warned me about the issues with zwave before I spent a stupid amount of money on it. This is one case where quality was not proportional to price.
The funniest/saddest part for me is that Iāve been getting loads of free Treatlife (tuya based) hardware in exchange for Amazon reviews. What Iāve had to actually buy, I scored for like $2-$3 a switch on eBay. The hardware quality is just as good as all my other stuff, and all of them can be flashed with esphome. I was paying like $30 a dimmer before and now Iām finding them for under $5. On top of all of that is the fact that they respond almost instantly every time. Esphome is just so rock solid.
My zwave network has been more reliable then the wifi switches I have in my house. Iāll admit that a year ago, that wasnt the case, but basically since late summer, itās been rock solid and instant.
Yeah a lot of work has been put into making zwave more reliable since I abandoned it. Not sure if itās still an issue but does your network still have to re-initialise whenever you restart home assistant?
Alright so its much better but I am not sure why as I changed a lot of things:
Switched to AOTEC Z hub
Because I switched to AOTEC, I pretty much started over
ONLY added the 4 switches I am trying to scene control
Switched to OpenZWave beta integration
Did a network heal after adding the 4 switches (I dont know if this is necessary or not)
Now the 3 lights turn off and 1 light turns on all within 2 seconds. It will be interesting to see if this remains true as I add the other ~15ish Z wave switches.
Spoke too soon, its slow again. And I see some errors in my log. I did a lot of adding and removing, so after I got the errors you see for node 60 in the pictures below, i started on clean slate again and just added all my nodes back. But issue still remains.
I am going to try having node red call a HA script, as @HeyImAlex suggested, as opposed to having node red itself turn the switches off/on.
And those āexpected responseā received is not unique to a certain switch or even a certain z wave stick as Iāve now had it happen on Nortek and AEOTEC sticks
What are you running HA on ? While I donāt use it myself, people have reported bad performance of Node Red on lower powered platforms like the Pi, especially with an SD card.
I would try the script thing, if only to rule out NR being responsible. Canāt help with the timeout error, Iām not too familiar with the low level implementation details of the zwave protocol. Iām sure someone with more knowledge about that will be able to tell you what that error means.
