Turning off all lights at once DDOS's my devices

Configuration
1

It’s night time and I want to turn off all the lights before I sleep. Naturally I ask Siri to “turn off all the lights”, and it turns off all my HA devices that are bridged via Homekit bridge. But since I have about ~30 devices, I see that the devices turn off one at a time in a random order, taking about a minute to finally settle. What’s worse, my HA devices can become unresponsive for a good few minutes, even if I toggle the HA entity directly!

Turning off 30 devices is a lot but I don’t think it should take that long. Most of my devices are z-wave light switches so I usually have a strong network. Obviously Siri is probably sending individual 30 commands to HA, and probably neither Siri nor HA know how to batch these commands into a single multicast one.

Though I’m not sure if Siri is necessarily the bottleneck here, since if I run the HA turn off lights action on all my devices, it is similarly slow. It also sometimes misses a lot of lights. And it’s just as slow whether I have all 30 lights on or just 1, which seems quite inefficient.

Anyone have advice on how to improve this?

2

I just tried upgrading the firmware on my Zooz ZST39. The Z-Wave docs mention my firmware version was known for hangups. A quick test seems to handle the “turn off all lights” command a bit better? Still takes a good 15-20 seconds, but that’s acceptable.

3

ZWave has radio link arbitration issues that get quite problematic on busy networks. Turning off many devices at once will cause these sorts of issues. You can write an automatic that loops all your lights and turns them off with a 3 second delay between each turn off to reduce the strain on the radio network and just call that as a bedtime routing.