I’m trying to set up a new Home Assistant system and I’m about to just walk away. I’ve had an ISY-994i in my house for a few years and it daily changed settings on at least one Z-Wave thermostat and one Insteon light dimmer. I’ve removed those devices from the ISY network and added them to my HA network, along with a couple Z-Wave door locks. (So I know those two devices communicate well.) I’m not thrilled with the ISY devices for several reasons. I’m not saying they’re bad, but there are a few things I don’t like about them.
I keep checking “Logbook” to see if there is error information there, but it seems quite minimal.
Normally I’d separate the Z-Wave and the Insteon posts, but since everything is failing or failed, I’m wondering if there are common causes. I’m also beginning to wonder if it could be radio signal issues. Both USB sticks (Z-Stick and Insteon) stay warm to the touch when they’re on. But I don’t see how that would make things get worse over a few days. At this point, I can work with two locks on my HA network and everything else just seems dead. As much as I’d rather use HA, nothing’s working (including trying to add a remove Z-Stick using ZWaveJS2MQTT) and I’m wondering if it’s just not able to work here or if I am missing something basic in the entire process.
Z-Wave:
I’m running HAOS on a Pi 4 and using Aeotec Z-Stick 7 for the Z-Wave network.
I’ve added two Schlage locks. HA connects to them, gets info, and controls them. It still does that. I added two GoControl thermostats to HA, for convenience, Upstairs and Downstairs. I had to do a factory reset on both thermostats to remove them from the ISY network. I got them both added to the HA network. I verified I could change the settings on them and read data from them. Then I set up automations for the Upstairs thermostat so, at night, it’d drop the temperature one degree an hour for a few hours until it reached our sleeping temperature.
(Side note: GoControl makes only one Z-Wave thermostat, so the model number is insignificant.)
I had trouble with this from the start. Many times the automation changed nothing. It’d run, but I’d go check the thermostat and see no change. I wrote scripts to set the temp on the Upstairs thermostat to specific temperatures. Then, yesterday, none of the automations worked and trying to run them directly or using scripts resulted in no changes. Also, when I was testing, I found I could run a script, it’d work and I’d run the next one to be sure it worked, and I’d see no result or change on the thermostat. I’m wondering if there’s some kind of timing issue or if the scripts aren’t terminating communication or if there’s an issue like that.
Today I checked, from the web interface, and most of the entities on both thermostats are “Unavailable.” Now both thermostats are listed as “Dead.” I also tried to heal the network, but they’re still dead. Both are in a large great room and are within 30’ of a Z-Wave lock in that room that is working okay.
Insteon:
I added an Insteon USB stick 2448A7 as I describe in this thread. Then I added an Insteon dimmer to it. Since adding the device did not require me to do anything on the device itself, and all I had to do was enter the address and category information, I never saw anything (until about an hour ago) that told me there was ever any communication between the USB stick and my dimmer. The HA web interface showed the dimmer as off and at 0% for brightness. I’d click on the On/Off widget and it’d go on, but the lights wouldn’t go on. A few seconds later the widget went back to off. Trying to change the brightness had a similar result. I could turn the lights on and HA didn’t see it.
I left the lights on and when I rebooted HA, about an hour ago, I saw the first hint it was actually communicating with the dimmer. It showed the dimmer state as On and gave the correct brightness level. But when I tried to turn the lights off through HA or change the brightness level, nothing happened and both controls reverted to where they were in a few seconds.
Overall:
The locks work, so I think the radio signals are working, but the three devices that won’t work, both thermostats and the dimmer, worked for years with the ISY. While all three could have gone wonky in the past 48-72 hours, I doubt that, though. There has been at least SOME communication with each device at some point, but I have no way of knowing what happened and why HA can’t reach them.
I have thought about radio signals. Right now I have the Pi 4 with HAOS on it in my study. The house is new and the walls are drywall with wood studs. Right through the wall from the Pi is one of the locks. I’ve left the door open. I don’t know how much the radio waves bounce around and I’m wondering if the issue is signal strength. Is is possible the USB sticks just don’t have the power to reach these devices in a reliable way?
If I could be sure it was signal strength, I’d just get a booster and check it out, but I don’t want to start down the road where I just start buying more and more little things to fix it and end up with a lot of things to return or that are laying around here.
Also, I have two Zooz Z-sticks. If anyone has personal knowledge of how well those work and if they have good signal strength, if I knew they’d work better than the Aeotec Z-Stick, I’d rebuild the Z-Wave network from scratch to use them instead. I’d just rather not do that unless I have a good reason to believe it’d make a difference.
Please help with any suggestions with either of these issues! At this point I have almost nothing to work with on HA to do anything.