I have an Aeotec 7 stick, an Aeotec range extender, connected to HA. All of the software is latest version (Zwave JS UI 8.23.2; Zwave JS 11.13.0, HA 2023.8.4/ OS 10.5). I also have 3 Kwikset 916 locks. Things were working fairly well, until perhaps the latest update to Zwave JS UI, but I’m not positive. Sometimes nodes will just randomly die, then they will come back alive eventually. Sometimes it seems to help if I go and manually operate the keypad to ‘wake it up’, or if I reset HA. Heal nodes and heal network doesn’t seem to do much. Sometimes a node will show as alive, but when I try to operate it (say by locking it from HA interface), it will then enter an unkown state (sometimes the lock actually locks, sometimes it doesn’t). Basically, it’s being rather flaky. I’m not changing anything else when these things happen and the network is small. Two of the locks that seem flakier are routed via the extender, as the stick can’t reach them.
I’ve tried looking at Zwave JS UI debug logs but I’m not sure what to look for; there are also so many components involved (e.g. HA, the stick, the extender, the firmware, the Zwave JS, the Zwave JS UI), it’s hard to know where to start debugging and what to do to make this more robust. And to make matters worse, it feels like Heisenbug, in that when I try to debug it, it goes away…
Let’s start with distances. What’s your best estimate of how far it is from the coordinator to each lock?
Whats the distance from each lock to the extender?
Do you have any other line powered devices?
How is your stick connected to yijr machine running HA?
I’ve had issues with my kwikset locks after some zwavejs updates (wrong status, slow to respond, etc). Looking at the release notes it appears the capabilities were updated on how these locks work in between some of the releases, so I did a re-interview. You can reinterview one at a time or all nodes from the zwave JS UI webpage. Ultimately I reinterviewed all my nodes, but keep in mind that takes awhile and you need to wakeup battery devices. Everything has been pretty stable since the re-interview.
You may just not have enough repeaters though - no line powered devices except one extender, and that 103’ of distance will not make a very good mesh, and zwave needs a good mesh to work properly. I have 912 locks with S0 security (I believe the 916 are S0 as well) and S0 secure devices use a lot of zwave bandwidth and need to send a bunch of messages back and forth to be encrypted, and if any are dropped you will have issues with status updates and control of the lock.
Hi, thanks for this. I did another update of the software, and reinterviewed everything - it seemed to take a really long time, locks were stuck in a sort of pending status for a while (some sort of animation in JS-UI), but after waking them up a few times and waiting a while, they all seemed to get back into shape and for now they seem to be working.
You mentioned that zwave needs a mesh to work properly, can you explain more? As I don’t have many zwave devices, I figured that a single line-powered repeater in the right spot would be sufficient - and for now it seems to be able to reach the distant devices. How would adding another powered/repeating node help, if the messages would likely route through the node I already have in any case? I’m not sure of a good way to fix the 103’ problem, as there’s nothing but yard in-between… But it is a good point re: S0, I believe you are right that these locks use S0 security, I didn’t realize it was chatty like that.
