I have two z-wave nodes in my garage; Node 17 is the light switch, hard wired to the power of the manual light switch. Node 18 is the PIR for motion detection (battery powered at 90%).
The nodes are placed only 1 meter apart inside the garage.
I set up these two nodes from their location in the garage, via the z-wave interface within Home Assistant. It was all good for 1-2 weeks, then the PIR started to fade out. I could see it was working from the red indication light when PIR was triggered, but it failed to send signals to the Aeotec Z-Stick Gen5.
The light switch does not report any Neighbors. Despite of that I am able to control the light switch from the button I have assigned in Lovelace, giving me a clue it is communicating fine with the Z-Stick and Home Assistant.
Now: I would expect the PIR to do the same, or at least use the light switch node as relay, but I t seems to fail at this point.
Both nodes are capable of routing and are z-wave plus compatible.
The PIR do in fact report neighbors when inside the house. When put in the garage none of the two nodes report any neighbors.
How can I get this to work flawlessly?
Is it possible to force the PIR to relay via the switch node?
How do I check how well the Z-wave communication works for the switch?
The switch reports no neighbors. Does that mean it connects directly to the USB Z-wave stick?
I know. And I would too expect it to report at least one neighbor. Even so. The swich (node 17) still accepts remote on/off instructions from Home Assistant.
Just for comparison: All of my nodes work fine, but not all report neighbours, and those that do report neighbours do not all have the stick (node 1) listed as their neighbour.
This is a screen shot of the motion detector, which is powered by battery, not of the light switch.
The wake up interval is set to 43,200 seconds, which is 12 hours. The node will wake up every 12 hours and report back to the controller, I believe this includes neighbor information. If you have restarted the ZWave network (i.e. restarted HA), the neighbor information is not known and you’ll have to wait for the next wake up time, or force a wake up yourself usually with a button press on the device to see any neighbor information.
Here is the graph. What seems odd is that the PIR (Node 18) is connected, while node 17 reports failed.
I just re-confirmed I can switch the garage light on/off from the Home Assistant app
Probably depends on how often you want to change batteries. The longer the time, the less the device wakes up and uses energy, the lower the time the more often it wakes up and uses energy. Personally I set all of mine to 43200. Also probably depends on what the device does when it wakes up (e.g. what info it sends to the controller). The downside is that when you restart the network, the node information (state, neighbors, etc.) are unknown until the node wakes up.
Yes, you can force a wake up. Not always convenient though. For example, my door sensor buttons are behind the cover which is secured with a tiny screw.
