Z-wave sensor entities missing after restart

Configuration Z-Wave
1

Home Assistant + Z-Wave newbie here. My initial, modest goal is to get a single humidity sensor hooked up. I have a raspberry pi 3 b+ and went with the Hassbian install. I’ve got the Aeotec Z-Stick hooked up into a usb port, and grabbed a Monoprice 15902 multi-sensor.

I went through the process of pairing via the Home Assistant UI (add node), and everything seemed great initially. I was seeing all of the sensor entities (humidity, temperature, luminance, etc) and was able to get them all on the home dashboard. I was a happy camper.

Then I moved my pi, which obviously necessitated a restart. Upon booting back up, those same entities that were giving me values before on the dashboard are now reporting as “Entity Not Available”, and when I go to my z-wave configuration in the UI, that sensor is reporting as a Probe (previously it was “dynamic”), and the only assigned entity visible is a “binary_sensor” type.

So I un-paired and re-paired, and again initially everything was good. Then I forced a reboot to test it out, and now I’m back to the same thing. I’m tailing the OZW logs on the pi itself, and am in fact seeing the sensor values come back, but for some reason home assistant can’t see that?

Looking for some tips here. Like I said I’m a newbie to home assistant and z-wave and I understand there are probably some intricacies of the z-wave sensor that I’m not used to working with, but the fact that the logs have the values that home assistant doesn’t see has me confused as to next steps since it seems that the connection between sensor and controller is strong.

I have tried all sorts of combinations of “refresh node” and “heal network” and “heal node”, none of those have any effect on what’s available to home assistant.

Also as a side note - where the heck does the zwave configuration get stored? I expected to see a zwave section in /home/homeassistant/.homeassistant/configuration.yaml but it’s not there. It must be somewhere, otherwise I wouldn’t see anything in the UI, correct?

2

The big thing to understand with battery powered Zwave devices is that they spend most of there time sleeping. The condition to wake them up depends on the device. A remote push button would only wake up when the button is pushed and then immediately go back to sleep. A motion sensor would only wake up when motion was first detected and then immediately go back to sleep. The motion part of the device can still be detecting motion but the Zwave radio would be asleep until the device no longer is detecting motion and the time since last motion is detected has expired. (the default for various devices would vary but usually 4 or 5 minutes).
If you need to make settings changes to a battery powered device, there will be a method to force the device to turn on its Zwave radio for a short period of time to accept signals from the Zwave controller.
You can test your device by watching the OZW_Log.txt file.
tail -f OZW_Log.txt and moving in front of the device remembering the timeout value.
To see the device from the UI, you can use the developer tools menu and <>
or from the Zwave menu in the Configuration menu.
Do also note that battery powered devices do not provide mesh service, so if you are only using battery powered devices they will need close, direct access to the Zwave controller. When you have wired Zwave devices, battery powered devices will be able to use the mesh network and use neighboring devices to connect to the controller.

3

Thanks for the tips on how the mesh stuff works out, I didn’t realize battery-powered devices were only consumers of the mesh.

I think in my case the connection (mesh) itself is fine - I can tail the logs and see updated values from the sensor in question (the only device I have). My problem is that I cannot figure out how to get Home Assistant to see these values - it acts as if the sensor is just a binary sensor, and all of the entities that were present when I first added the node, like temperature, humidity, luminance, etc are all gone. Now there’s just a single “binary_sensor” entity.

4

Check your zwcfg*.xml file and see if the entry for the Node has all the values for the sensor you are expecting. If not, your reboots are causing this info to be lost from the cache file. You can try excluding and re-adding the node again, or try sending the NIF using the program switch and doing a “Refresh Node” from the control panel. Then shutdown HA or save the config, do not reboot.

When you reboot after adding the node it isn’t cached in the zwcfg*.xml file. OZW can forget which values a node provides because that information is discovered only when you add the node, and it uses the cache to remember those values. It can usually rebuild this info over time, but it sounds like in your config HA is ignoring values that are being added at runtime.

The HA zwave config is saved in .storage/.

5

how did you make out with this? I’m in a similar quandry… been using HA for quite a while on <0.8 versions without any issue. made the ill-fated decision to wipe everything to factory and start fresh. now I can’t get all my battery powered z-wave sensors to behave. some of them show all entities right away, but then they disappear with a restart of HA - not even a reboot (even though I click the SAVE CONFIG button every time I make a change). some of them only pull a couple entities on inclusion to the network. some entities will reappear if I force a refresh by clicking the zwave button on the sensor 3 times, others will lose sensors.

i haven’t been keeping up on the changes from version to version, but it is still possible to take one complete sensor profile and duplicate it for all other identical sensors? would this solve our problem, at least temporarily?

6

Well, no real resolution. I removed and then re-added the sensor, again. It found the entities but none of them had any value, so I clicked the sensor button a few times and it’s been working for a week or so. I have not attempted a reset, and will hold off as long as I can as I’m assuming I’ll lose the entities again.

1 Like
7

not 100% the answer I was hoping for, but I’m glad it’s working for you (so far!). It seems a lot of people are having a lot of trouble with HA and battery powered z-wave devices lately. i’ve managed to cobble together an older version and i have what i need… but my database is borked and my garage door opener isn’t supported on the older version :frowning:

as with all things open source, i must be patient

8

I set up my aeotech Z stick, it show in HA, but after a restart it disappears. Now I can’t add the sensor back even if I do get the system to recognise the Z stick. Just cannot get it to work at all.

9

Contributing to the thread - similar experience here, I have a few Hank HKZW-DWS (Door Window Sensors from Monoprice) and they’ve never worked for more than a week. Two motion sensors I ordered along with the DWS’s work fine.
I gave up on the DWS’s and replaced with DIY 8266/Tasmota/ESPHome devices.