Zwave Upgrade Help/Suggestion

Configuration Z-Wave
1

I would like to get your help on correcting/upgrading my zwave setup. Here’s a little background. I have been using HA nearly since its inception and my zwave setup has been the backbone of my home automation. I currently have about 45+ zwave devices with a combination of switches, locks, thermostats and battery powered sensors. Up until last week this setup was working perfectly for a number of years except for the occasional slow response that I have learned to live with.

Last week I was unfortunate to have been hit by a power surge from a lightning storm that took out all of my Unifi equipment, my verizon internet equipment, tv, garage opener etc. I have also discovered that my zwave setup is no longer working or at least working properly. It appears my Aeotec Z-Stick Series 5 no longer responds to signals sent from the various devices. I also had a few zwave switches get fried as they just no longer work.

Long story short, I believe that my Aeotec Z-Stick no longer works correctly and this I where I need some help figuring out my next step. I also have a GoControl HUSBZB-1 stick that I currently use only the ZHA part of it but was thinking that maybe I could try to salvage what I can from my current zwave setup over to the zwave part of the GoControl HUSBZB-1 stick. I also realize that zwave is currently going a major transformation with in HA moving to a new protocol.

For those that are zwave savvy and have used the new zwave setup what steps would you recommend I take to use the GoControl HUSBZB-1 stick, move existing working zwave devices over to the new stick and move to the new zwave setup within HA?

I am fairly sure that I won’t be able to remove the association from the original Aeotec stick so I am assuming I’ll need to try and put them back to a factory setting?? I also have the GoControl HUSBZB-1 stick attached to /dev /ttyUSB0 for the ZHA and I would assume the zwave would attach to /dev /ttyUSB1. My Aeotec stick is currently connected to /dev /ttyACM0.

Any thoughts or ideas would be appreciated.

2

Personally I’d first start investigating if the Aeotec stick is indeed fried or has some other issues. You can try hooking it up to a Pc and use Simplicity Studio to see what is left. An other option is to fire up the new OZW integration to use the OZW Admin tool and see what’s there.

As for the new OZW integration, it’s great. It’s faster than the built-in Z-Wave 1.4 and has more options. I also like the MQTT messages so I can actually hook up more events/triggers to it.

I have no experience with the GoControl hardware so cannot comment on that.

Good luck!

3

Thanks for the info and sorry I didn’t respond sooner but I have been spending the past few days rebuilding my zwave network. I was unable to restore my existing setup so I moved forward with the new OpenZWave(beta) setup using my HUSBZB-1 stick. After some initial growing pains I am about 95% restored. I have to replace three switches that were impacted by the surge.

For the most part everything paired fairly easy and I was happy to see that I had no problems adding my thermostats and lock. Everything seems to be functioning very well except for some dimmer switches that at times don’t appear to be updating in HA. I’ll have to investigate this further.

I was able to use my Aeotec stick to remove the prior associations so I wonder if it might be salvageable if it could be factory reset.

In the end this might be a small blessing because I was able to start from new and got rid of a few dead nodes that I had in my old setup. Time will tell but so far so good.