I moved from a Vera hub recently to a Z-Stick Gen5 US ZW090. Overall the experience has been much better, however, I realized the Z-Stick has a lot of trouble communicating to multiple devices simultaneously. Are there any other sticks that do this better? What is the top recommended stick for HA these days?
I have a growing network, with over 15 devices. I’m ready to install a bunch more, but I want to figure out this key cog in communication before I go much further.
I also have that stick and installed it a few weeks ago. Had no trouble at all and everything works as it did with my former system. It took a few hours before I figured it all out, but that is also the fun of it. I realy don’t know if there are better sticks but this one works good.
I have same stick and a working system with 36 nodes on it.
I would ‘stick’ with that if I were you.
The z wave ozw 1.6 implementation is due soon (don’t hold your breath)
And the standards will be fully open by end of 2020
Recent open standards have all been recently anounced which ‘could’ dramatically affect the landscape.
It’s best just to work with what you have, add what you NEED and wait for the dust to settle
Thanks for the feedback. I have a room with 3 Inovelli RED On/Off (LZW30-SN) switches in a 3 gang box very close to my stick in a nice sized network. In HA, if I toggle 1 switch at a time, with 5 seconds between clicks, I can never get the 3 switches to reliably turn on or off. Is this normal?
I seem to recall reading that only to use secure for things that need to be secured like door looks. Extra packets are needed to talk to a secure device verses unsecure and so more network traffic. All my switches are unsecure while door locks were setup in secure mode. I have about 15 zwave devices an all work virtually instantaneously and not concerned that some bad guy wants to turn on/off my lights because those switches are unsecured.
I’ve noticed most switches, dimmers, and fan controls zwave devices don’t even have the ability to use a secure connection anyways. Some makers might be different but the GE/Jasco ones don’t support it as far as I can tell.
I use secure for almost everything (for no real reason). I also use the Aeotec Z-stick.
However, I noticed that switching from a raspberry pi 3b+ to a 4 dramatically increased the speed at which my network responds to actions. What hardware are you using?
I ended up getting this to work much better. I used custom openzwave configuration including the right metadata for the Inovelli switches. Also, the switches are in a metal box and the z-wave signal was having trouble going to the network, so I added a powered zwave device across the room from where the switches are to give them a great node to hop from.
@tekmaven - I’m having the same problem you had. Have around 20 Fibaro Dimmer 2 dimmers, all mains powered, running from a Aeotec USB stick, but system has real issue turning off multiple dimmers at the same time.
How did you determine that those switches were having trouble receiving the z-wave signal?
Overall, the performance has been better, basically acceptable. I expect it to be a little better than it is, so I am going to continue evaluating changes that I can make to improve the performance of the network. I am in the process of switching to ZWave2MQTT right now, which allows the use of openzwave 1.6 and the latest config database.
Tekmaven, unless you reply TO someone they don’t get a notification.
Only you as the thread owner, get a default notification.
I would absolutely agree with first and ski552.
Only include secure if you have no other option
Secure packets are a nightmare, 4 per message vs 1 on non-secure.
If you can possibly do it rebuild your network and ONLY include secure if you have no other option. (I said it twice for emphasis)
So, what is the best way to include DW117 repeaters, mostly to support Schlage locks. If included non-secure, do they repeat secure messages to the locks?
@tekmaven which openzwave files did you use for the Inovellis? My entire zwave network has taken a significant performance hit since I added two red on/off switches and one red dimmer. Really pulling my hair out trying to diagnose.
