Zwave polling interval - what does it do + recommendation?

Configuration Z-Wave
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I have a Aeon Z-stick and my zwave config looks like this:

zwave:
  usb_path: /dev/ttyACM0
  polling_interval: 60000

I see some people are using a polling interval of 10000 or 30000 instead. What does it actually do and what is the recommended setting?

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Every so many milliseconds, the Z-Wave controller will ask all the devices their status - subject to a per-device configuration (which can be set to poll every time, every other time, or not at all.)

This allows HA to find out the states of devices that don’t properly self-report. A number of older light switches, for example, don’t tell anybody when you go and press the physical “off” switch, but when they are polled they will report that they are off.

The downside is that the Z-Wave network gets crowded with messages - it is fairly low-bandwidth - and this will cause responses to be slower or messages to be dropped entirely. Nothing’s more annoying than when you activate a scene and only 5 out of the 6 lights turn on.

If you don’t know why you need polling you probably don’t need it at all. Also, you should definitely only enable polling for devices that need it. Hope that helps.

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Thanks @netopiax for clarifying a bit. I am still learning about z-wave and my system has gotten more reliable while adding more and more devices - currently I have 16.

I have had some issues with lamps and switches not turning on or off as expected, and even more issues with battery sensors that don’t update frequently enough. I don’t know about the pulling in my config, I thought it was some sort of default but I may very well have copied it somewhere and put it there. Are you saying I would do fine without any polling at all? Or should I set it to 300,000 (not sure how many minutes that represent) or something like that?

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The default is 60000, so removing the line won’t really change anything.

Separately, each Z-Wave device has a configuration related to polling (polling_intensity) that can set whether it gets polled at all. You can set that in the Configuration > Z-Wave > Z-Wave Node Management screen - select a Node and an Entity and the setting will appear. The settings are stored in zwave_device_config.yaml and you can edit them directly there too.

The device specific setting defaults to no polling. So the primary Z-Wave polling_interval setting really doesn’t do anything unless you go enable polling for some of your devices. It sounds like you don’t have anything to worry about right now.

Lamps and switches not turning on/off at all wouldn’t be affected by polling. If you are adding more devices and finding better reliability, range was probably the issue there.

As for battery devices, they work quite differently from anything plugged in or hard-wired. Most sensor type devices sleep most of the time and only send a message out when triggered, e.g. you open the door. Some of them, like a siren or lock that need to be triggered wirelessly, will wake up only once every second or two to see if they have a message. Sensors will not likely respond to polling, in any case. The siren or lock type might but you can expect a delay in their response.

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