Z-Wave Door Sensor Cache Load

Hi all, I have two gen 5 Aeotec Window / Door sensors

  1. When I restart home assistant and go check the devices these two are always show up as CacheLoad
  2. If I go to the sensors press the button 3 times to wake the devices and then heal the network from the z-wave interface on home assistant these sensors work perfectly fine.
  3. They keep working for days / weeks at a time but once home assistant restarts they go back to the previous state and I have to go through the process again!
  • I have gone through the following sequence several times and now at a loss for whats going on.
  • I always make sure to do the heal while they are in place so they pair and mesh with their real neighbors.
  • I have studied the OZW log but havent found any good leads there either.

Any ideas on how I can troubleshoot and or fix the problem?

Thanks in advance

This is expected behaviour for battery powered zwave devices. Everything should be working fine.

This is covered in the docs. As @iuro said, with battery powered devices it’s perfectly normal.

Basically, (as explained elsewhere in the docs) battery powered devices spend most of their time in low power sleep mode. They’ll still function normally in this state, but the power intensive Z-Wave “brain” isn’t operational in this state. Every so often it will Wake and talk to the controller. This is a power intensive time, so devices will try to minimise it. It might be every few hours, once a day, once a week, or anywhere in between.

You can usually control that sleep interval, but if you reduce it you’ll reduce the battery life of the device.

It doesnt appear to ever come out of the cacheload status (Which my other battery multi sensors do see #3)
On top of that it doesnt trigger / reflect door open / close status when its stuck in Cache Load.

Like I said if I go through the heal process it works as expected until I restart at which point it is broken again even if left for hours / days.

z-wave-issues

All my battery powered zwave devices exhibit this exact behaviour and all work as expected. Are you using secure mode inclusion with your zwave devices?

No I havent been, I just used add node.
These door sensors are pretty old so I am unsure if they even support security?
I will give it a shot and report back.

Quite possibly then you’ve got broken devices.

Seems unlikely two sensors will break in the same way like this.

I have the same exact situation and its driving me Nutz! I brought several Aeotec Sensors over from my SmartThings install and I am finding tons of Issues in Home Assistant I never had in SmartThings. To be fair, Battery Powered Z-wave sensors have been flaky to a certain extent on every platform. Home assistant needs to add some tools for better control of Z-Wave devices with out users needing tons of Yaml to so something simple like set a battery sensor.

I got annoyed and left the sensors alone for a long time, it just so happens I had another crack earlier this week and managed to get them to work consistently!
The thing that did the trick for me was to set config option 121 to a value of 272.

This is the original post that guided me to the solution.

I had to faff around a bit to get the node to take the config setting, here’s hoping it solves your issue.

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