Smartwings Z-Wave roller blinds lag/erratic behaviors

Configuration Z-Wave
1

Hi guys, I’ve been adding smartwings zwave roller blinds to my home assistant and I’ve been having some unwanted behavior.

When using the smartwings remote the blinds answer pretty much instantly. When using home assistant, however, I get variable lag… Ideally I’d like the blinds to come up/down in sync in the same room…

I’m wondering if this is a problem with the blinds, if its something with my setup, or just configuration… I’m using a Zooz 800LR dongle, I have some powered ZWave devices throughout the apartment, I dont think the zwave network is “bad” per se, but I dont have a lot of experience…

I’ve tried healing the network, but dont see any difference…

I’ve grouped the blinds within Home Assistant (I understand there isnt a way of doing a ZWave group like a Zigbee group, which would perhaps help this issue)… Is there a way of improving this or at least can someone kindly point me to where I’d monitor for errors?

(I also notice that something the HA cover group that has the blinds seems to be out of sync with where the blinds are, like if one blind goes to the requested position, but another “misses out” on the command)…

Any and all help is appreciated…

I’ve considered changing the motors to their new Matter version, but I dont want to do that unless I’m relatively sure it would fix the performance issues?

Thanks very much for all help!

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Some logs : Subscribed to Z-Wave JS log messages…2025-04-14T18:51:12.239Z DRIVER one or - Pastebin.com

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I have the variable delay at times. I have a z-wave repeater in my attic and if I unplug it and plug it back in the delay goes away. Not sure what to make of it but it seems to be 100% caused by something with z-wave. It’s only the shades though. Maybe they need to be directly connected to the hub.

In other areas of my house I have motion sensors which trigger z-wave light switches and they are instant.

The delay effect is terrible. When I use my voice assistant, I wait and then one starts moving and sometime later the other starts moving.

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Hi Brian, this sounds just like what I have… I’m climbing up the walls haha…

I will try and search if there is some way to for the blinds to stick directly to the controller… I have a few keypads that act as repeaters so I can just “unplug” them to test unfortauntely… thanks anyways!!

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I have 20 of the zwave shades. Despite a robust zwave network, I had random delays and blinds not responding at times. I tried staggering commands, adding refresh commands but nothing helped. I noticed They always work with the smartwing remote so I gave in and bought a bond hub. Game changer for my use case, which is mainly pico remotes for open and close.

Now when clicking the open or close button on a pico, the bond hub issues the commands instead of zwave. Performance has been very stable even when issuing a command to 5 blinds. The bond hub issues the command in series so the blinds close slightly staggered which is fine by me.

I like having the Zwave too. It is great for tracking position on dashboards and HomeKit. I can issue commands on those as well, but I rarely do.

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5

The forum didnt notify me about this but I ended up coming to the exact same solution lol… I had a bond left over from controlling some older Somfy blinds and now I use the bond to control the smartwings too… I set them up as Doonya bidirectional, seems to be working well! thanks for your input too!!

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Same issue here. Only got worse in the past 2-3 months to where some blinds just fail to report back within a ping window.

I performed a health check on one of the nodes and the average latency is 5-6 seconds which is terrible in comparison to all other z-wave devices in the network.

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Hi @PXSS yeah, in the end I just put 2 bond bridges to cover the entire house, and its much better at control than the zwave…

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What Zwave controllers are people using? I only have 2 blind but they work better with Zwave than they do the remote… BUT I have an older Zwave radio.

I’m curious if the newly reported problems are due to Zwave LR compatible or late series controllers.

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I use the Zooz 800, curious if this could be the issue, it is an LR stick so if they dont play nice with those that could be the issue indeed. Which one do you use?

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Every problem I’ve interacted with on here so far is with the 800/LR radios. I have the previous generation… 500 series I think? It’s an Aeotec. I’m traveling right now so I’ll check when I land.

I suspect there’s an issue with the LR capable controllers.

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Interesting, that could be a source of issue! I wonder if we’d ever get a fix if it requires a firmware update on the motor…

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Wanted to chime in here as well. I have 13 Z-Wave blinds so far and even with multicast I’m not able to get them to be anything even close to synchronized. I’m also using a Zooz ZST39 800LR stick and these are (currently) the only Z-Wave devices connected. At this point, I’m considering just shelling out for the Smart Link Pro hub, unless anyone else has had any luck.

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The basic Bond hub did the trick for me. It was a bit cheaper than the Smartwings pro and has a good community of users for support. I would have preferred wired connectivity, but I’m powering it with a POE splitter and it’s been great. I’ve only had one time where a shade didn’t close and it was because the shade’s battery was low.

If you end up with the Smartwings pro hub I’d be curious what your experience is. I’m not that bothered by the blinds not closing in sync but if the Smartwings hub fixes that, I might consider it.

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@roy1 and all - hey, I had the same issue but I think I have largely fixed it. I’ve got 8 smartwings roller shades connected to HA via the Zooz ZST39 800 series zwave USB stick. When I used the built-in “group” helper in HA, the shades would all start moving in random order with huge delays between each one - it was ugly. At the recommendation of Claude AI, I replaced the group helper with a script that actions each shade in parallel (rather than in series). It’s not a perfect fix - they are not perfectly synchronized to all start at the same time. But it is MUCH closer and no longer random. Here’s an example snippet of my Open Shades script with 2 devices.

sequence:
  - parallel:
      - action: cover.open_cover
        metadata: {}
        data: {}
        target:
          device_id: {deviceID1}
      - action: cover.open_cover
        metadata: {}
        data: {}
        target:
          device_id: {deviceID2}
alias: Open Shades
description: ""
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Hi @kroyster thats a good workaround, I didnt know parallel execution was a thing! thanks for sharing this!

I’m using the bond for now, but may try the parallel as it might work quite similar to the bond solution.

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Having issues pairing smartwings zwave motor
Just says “device has been provisioned but not included in your network”
Never seen this with any device before. Factory reset motor but did nothing.

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Using an aeotec zstick 7 and my blinds work great. For what it’s worth!

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I am (and I think most others having issues are) using the 800 series sticks… (Mine is a Zooz 800 LR)

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I have 11 Smartwings woven wood shades using z-wave and a Zooz 800 LR controller. Other than the one that didn’t integrate properly and had to be reset and added again, they’ve been pretty solid so far. However, the last one I installed, which is no further than the others from the hub, will not stay connected. It will work for a bit and then just stop communicating for days. Pressing the physical button on the shade seems to wake it up, it will report in and I’ll see it has 100% battery in HA and then an hour later it’s unresponsive again. Maybe it’s defective. Troubleshooting feedback is sparse.
I see the recommendation for a Bond hub but I’m not seeing a Z-wave version of this - maybe I’m looking at the wrong thing. I see Smartwings has a Wi-Fi hub and Amazon has some Bond hubs that control non-Wi-Fi devices but the one’s I saw operate at 350-400MHz and z-wave is 908MHz. Can someone clarify what hub is resolving the Smartwings Z-wave issues?

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The Bond basically “emulates” the remote control that comes with the blinds, its not z-wave… it works in place of z-wave.

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