Hey all, I have 3 or 4 Z-Wave devices that I use for holiday decorations so they are active on the Z-Wave network and then I remove them for a period of time. Typically in the past when I have done this I just unplug then and then repair/build the network. This has worked for me in the past but this time when I try it the repair seems to run forever and no devices appear to respond to commands now. I’m assuming the issue could be related to the removal of nodes, but I’m not sure.
I wanted to ask here what the suggested best practice is for Z-Wave devices that you want to temporarily remove but add back at a future point. Is it ok to just remove the device and repair the network? Should I actually remove the device from the Z-Wave network even though I will add it again in the future?
Any suggestions on either the problem or best practice for temporary removal would be appreciated. Thank you!
Technically, Yes. You should. Who knows what your coordinator is doing trying to get it back on line. In practice it probably won’t matter. But ive seen one rogue device not acting correctly take down entire ZWave meshes.
It doesn’t take that long and if you’re using entities instead of devices in your automation as long as you give it the old name you should not have to edit anything.
If you wanted tbe really clean about it you could make the automations etc that use these into packages and remove the package when you pull the device.
I do the same thing so they are ready for next year. Sometimes I’ll use them for testing something or a temporary “thing” I’m doing but I just leave them there so they don’t get listed as dead in Z-Wave JS in case I want to fix my network.
Thanks all for your input. I don’t have a great place to leave these since plugged in so I plugged them back in and excluded them. Now my network seems to be responsive again. I’m not sure why my method worked in the past, but I’m glad to have a functional house again.
When you re-add them you should add them one at a time until your network starts to have issues so you can identify which one may be the problem device. Give yourself plenty of time to test this before you actually need to put them back into service because it might take a while for your network to show problems.