My Smartthings install of 4+ years seems to have died. ST Support has no idea so far why most of the ZWave switches are offline and why nothing control the ones that are online. I can tell from the tone, shortly the suggestion will be to factory reset the hub.
So my plan is to move everything over to a new HA setup running hassIO on an old laptop I had laying around.
I started by Excluding a couple switches that showed online. They excluded successfully and the IDE confirmed they were no longer listed.
So far so good. I got ZWave JS installed, configured and paired 2 Monoprice Smart plugs placed on different floors and close to most of the switches. Problem is, I go into the integration and click AddNode, it shows it is in inclusion mode. I press the paddle up and wait…I press the paddle down, nothing.
My Zwave controller is on a powered USB hub and is a HUSBZB-1 ZigBee/Zwave. I seem to have no issues adding ZigBee devices.
Some jasco switches have a config Parameter 19 called “alternate exclusion”. If that is enabled somehow you have to click up 2x then down 2xfast- like you need one finger on the top button and another finger on the bottom button fast (if you use one finger by the time you move it is not fast enough). With alternate exclusion enabled, one press will not include or remove the switch.
If that fails, the switch can be factory reset by clicking up 3x, then down 3x- fast as well (two separate fingers) which will usually get it to pair.
Is there a chance you have a bad Z-Wave device? You might have noticed delays in automation if this is a culprit. There is no limit to the havoc a broken z-wave device can inflict especially if it is a key node. I have about 20 GE switches and I had to exclude some of them multiple times to get them to include when I switched to HA (the older they were the harder it was to exclude). Are you trying to securely include the switches? Are you running the latest firmware?
Do your switches have an airgap that you can pull to kill power or you can cycle the breaker? This has been known.
Very good point, and that would mean your problem on Smartthings would just come over to Home Assistant too. However, if you can get everything over, you will find zwavejs has many more logs and tools available to troubleshoot zwave issues vs Smartthings. For example when I was on Smartthings, zwave was always slow. I chalked it up to cloud latency, but same issue in Home Assistant.
Turns out I had a node continuously sending power management reports. I had it configured to 0 thinking it disabled the report, but it made it so there was “0 seconds” between reports
You’re a genius! I have been trying to factory reset those switches for days. Your suggestion of triple tap up/down but use different fingers was the trick!
After that it included just fine with a single press UP. Now the only issue I am seeing is in the Lovelace UI. If I manually turn the switch on, the UI updates to show it on. If I then turn it off from the UI, i see the slider go to off, but then half a second later it goes back to showing ON - even though the light is still really off. So I cant really control it through the UI
Thanks, I did use the airgap to reset. That actually got a few of the switches to go back to ONLINE in ST.
Turns out the issue was needing to factory reset as I bet the ST Hub didnt properly set the bit in the switch when I excluded it. So from the Hub POV it was gone, but the switch thought it was still under ST control.
Good glad it worked. Another “trick” of zwave is that if you put any hub in range in exclusion mode (ie just go to “remove node”) , even if a device never belonged to that hub, you can exclude it from its old hub.
So even if a device is still included with Smartthings, if you perform the exclusion with zwavejs, the device will exclude from the Smartthings hub (if it’s off). I guess they do this incase the old hub dies or is gone.
That’s not good. You can try and “re-interview” the device- it’s possible that something went wrong with polling the switches capabilities at startup.
@mwav3 Thanks for the clues. I dont have any options on the Configure page.
It turns out there were 2 disabled devices: sensor.node_4_node_status which when I manually enabled it, solved the weird behavior. The other disabled one is number.garage_light_basic. What does that do?
