I recently switched to Hoime Assistant. All of my smoke detectors now needs a weekly battery replacement! WTH is going on there?
Not only, that Home Assistant is unable to show the battery status (all seem to have 100%), it drains them in a week, when they normally last 2-3 years.
Is there a setting, which tells the devices to wake up in a much shorter time then for example at Devole Home Control?
They normally wakes up once a day and sends a wake up signal, and waits for 10 seconds for a response(due to Devolo documentation). What is Home Assistant doing in that time? Is it trying a constant communication for some reason? I dont get it and i also have no clue, where these activities are logged.
ZHA and Zigbee2MQTT are Zigbee integrations, but the cause to the problem might still be what NathanCu describes, as Z-wave function in the same way as Zigbee.
most devices have settings to limit battery reporting. But also normal state reporting can cause battery drain if triggered every few seconds, battery devices are not meant for that.
Also accitdentally adding ’ polling’ will kill your battery soon.
Zwave UI gives you opportunity to view ‘raw ’ zwave traffic in logs. You can spot easily if you smoke detectors come allong more then once a minute. Check on device control panel on ’ events’ it will show devices traffic
Post a picture of you devices parameters and values. It will be possible to get battery life back to normal if we dig through all options/settings
This cannot be the case: I have a powered siren and at least one plug on each etage, the same config i have used for years with no issues with Devolo Home Control. The only change was the replacement of Home Control with Home Assistant.
It can a be the case if the HA controller picked a sub optimal repeating mesh. It can also be the case that the controllers first hop is weaker causing different routing to happen than in the prior controller.
When I swapped from SmartThings to a Aeotec controller using JsUI (only change, same gear otherwise) my first hop was SIGNIFICANTLY weaker and I needed to install three more repeating devices to reach everything to stabilize comms. So yes check your mesh.
I also had errantly added everything at highest security possible and was flooding that mesh whereas my prior system accounted for it automatically, my choice overloaded the network causing more harm than good.
My point is just because it ‘worked prior and only change was moving to HA’ that can mean a lot of things.
Yes, the security type can both be a cause of huge increase in data, increase in transmission faults because of it, and then battery drain. Especially S0 security should be avoided. For smoke alarms I would propose unsecure inclusion because it is a battery operated device where reliability is way more important than security.
It seems Devolo Home Control is quite old, not unlikely it also included the devices unsecure.
I have many battery operated z-wave divices, mostly Fibaro smote detectors, heat-it wall remotes, fibaro motion detector and aeotec wallmote that have excellent battery lifetime.
I have no clue, how to check my mesh. Is there any visualization or even some information which route the signal is taking?
I only dropped Devolo Home Control because Devolo dont maintain the app for years and i was no more running on iPhone 14 Pro Max and 15 Pro Max … regarding connectivity it was rock solid. I switched to Homey, but because of the lack of compatibility, i use Home Assistant for my Z-Wave devices… its plain frustrating to see, that my decision was wrong. I seem to have dealt with lemons and replaced a fundamentally functional system with an unstable makeshift solution.
I mean, you still haven’t told us anything at all about your system.
What ZWave coordinator are you using? a USB stick? which one?
If it’s a USB stick, have you got it on an extension cable (you should).
What ZWave interface are you running? ZWaveJS? Built into Home Assistant or externally?
Im using a Z-Stick 7 and Raspberry Pi 4 model B. Z-Wave Js is running directly in Home Assistant.
I also tryed Z-Wave Js Ui … bit it is not running and constantly throwing errors: „Z-Wave client not connected“
What is the reason for using an extension cable?
Im my logs i also notice a lot of controller jammed messages. Reading the thread’s connected to the issue does not raise my trust in the whole solution.
Because a raspberry pi is notoriously bad for throwing interference onto the USB bus specifically in the 3ghz band. If the stick is plugged directly into the Pi sometimes the interference is so bad the Pi can’t read the stick (no ZWave.) we can see this condition in logs.
To combat it you should at a MINIMUM use a half meter usb extension to get it away from the Pi but better is a powered USB2 hub to isolate the USB3 bus entirely and also provide extra power to USB which is the second most likely cause off issues on a Pi.
So what eusb stick are you actually using.(edit see zstick7. Do you know what firmware?)
I guess I have been lucky so far and my ZWave network is rock solid with an Aotec Gen5 stick directly connected to the USB3 of a RPi. About 30 nodes and counting; mostly using S2 security. Maybe now I start seeing problems just because I wrote this )
S0 has 3x the network overhead as S2. General recommendation is don’t join S0 unless you have to for something like a lock or motion sensor in a security system.
S2 generally doesn’t suffer from the same comms issues.
The MOST important thing you can do, is get that USB stick away from the Pi as soon as possible.
You only have to do a quick Google about the Raspberry Pi 4 and USB3 to read countless pages about the interference that the USB3 ports cause, something incidentally that is not exclusive to the Pi, MANY computers suffer from this issue.
Here is Intel’s research paper on USB3 interference - showing it’s not specific to the Pi 4.
You can see on page 8 that while most people complain about the interference on 2.4GHz affecting WiFi (and Zigbee, Bluetooth, Thread etc) - the highest amount of interference is actually around 800MHz - 1GHz - which just happens to be the area ZWave sits.
Where do i see if im using S0 or S2 and how do i Control that? I simply added the devices without having a deeper understanding nor interest in the protocol specifications.
So i guess it was not a bad idea to have my raspi in a metal case from the very beginning (Miuzei Raspberry Pi 4 Gehäuse… https://www.amazon.de/dp/B08TR9KMJM )
My stick has firmware: 7.17.2
As i was Reading about the issues, i was searching fir a more current version, but trying to update to 7.18.? failed. It was also a bit tricky to even find a somewhat official firmware for it.
