Light Switch automatically turning on

Other Devices & Integrations Lighting & Load Control
1

I have one GE on/off switch that on a few occasions now has turned itself on. The switch is in my garage, and is probably the furthest away from my VeraPlus controller. However I don’t believe it is a distance issue. If I turn on the light via the WebUI, it immediately turns on. Yet when I turn on or off the light from the switch itself, it takes a few minutes for the node to be polled and updated in the WebUI.

My questions are:

  • How can I see why the light it turning itself on? There is only 1 scene that would trigger the light to turn on. (If the garage door opens at night, turn on the light.) Of the three times the light has turned on, the garage door was never opened.

  • I have other lights that report their status back to Vera within seconds. Why would this light switch be different and take minutes?

The only recent changes I made was to add two more door sensors and a motion sensor. During my investigations, I looks like my Luup service is randomly restarting itself too. Would having too many CountDown Timers cause this? I have 13. (Family has a bad habit of leaving lights on. My original idea was to use one timer multiple times, but then I realized that could cause issues with lights turning off too early, or not at all.)

Any ideas on areas I can look at to get insight on?

Thanks in advance.

2

Put a notification on the garage door sensor. My guess is that it’s reporting the door open randomly, even though it isn’t, and triggering the scene. You could also just wait until it happens again and check the last run time of the scene. As for the reporting of the switch, the GE switches don’t have the instant feature. This means they report when they are polled. This can be anywhere from a second or two up to a minute or more. I have several of them and any randomness I’ve experienced has led back to something I programmed…

3

Thanks Mike. It was the false alarm of the garage door sensor thinking it was opened. Strange thing is that it happens quite often. Just yesterday it reported one door opened and then a minute later the other door opened. After 10 minutes or so it reported them both closed. Are false positives normal with a Vera?

4

No, they’re not. If your door sensor is sending spurious trip/untrip signals then I would guess that the sensor is faulty, or it is “too sensitive”.

You don’t say what type of sensor you’re using. I presume a door sensor with a magnet. If the magnet for such a sensor is at the outer range of the reed switch, it may be that expansion/contraction due to temperature or even wind rattling the door could be causing the trip.

5

I have a zigbee door sensor that used to do this until I adjusted it a bit further. It’s quite reliable now. Motion sensors are good for this, as they sometimes detect a temperature change as motion…

6

It’s a GoControl Garage Door Controller. What’s strange is that it can go days, or weeks with no issue and then one or two days back to back with issues.

7

I previously had a sensor / controller that was constantly throwing false alarms. The vendor offered to take it back if I paid to ship it to them, but had no means to actually test it to determine if there was a problem. I couldn’t create a scenario under which it would send the false alarm, so I just ripped it out and replaced the whole setup.

I now use a tilt sensor to drive the entire thing and it’s immensely more reliable.

As far as your switch not updating, there are some GE/Jasco switches that can have a capability set that will cause them to send instant alert, but I don’t know the model off-hand. I have a couple of them in my setup and I pushed the capability to it to enable the feature and they work just like my Leviton switches now. Dig around on here and you’ll eventually find the thread that talks about enabling that functionality (I hope).

8

Most GE/Jasco switches will send out a NIF on a change. If the switch is within direct range of the controller, the controller will see this change of state and it will work like instant status. But the NIF won’t route, so if the switch is out of range of the controller (but still within the network), the NIF will not be seen by the controller. I’ve never seen a GE/Jasco that directly supports instant status, but we can hope that the new Z wave plus switches coming out after the patent expiration might support it.

9

I may see a light at the end of this tunnel. No pun intended. I’ve been having all sorts of weird issues. The garage light turning itself on, the garage door controller saying it was opened when it wasn’t. Another light switch reporting it cannot communicate. My Lua engine would restart every 2-3 minutes too, mucking with my timers, which are mostly gone now. I was starting to rethink if my switch from Wink to Vera was the right move.

Then I came across another thread mentioning total system instability caused by their motion detector. Deleted my motion sensor and the Lua engine stopped crashing. Now I need to add my notification back in for when the garage opens and see if those false positives are corrected too.

Thanks everyone for the tips and ideas.

10

What’s “NIF”? Speak English!!! :slight_smile:

My GE/Jasco switches send instant notification as I use them to trigger scenes and the scenes fire immediately on press.

11

NIF is a Node Information Frame. It’s a way to get around the instant status. It’s not sending the status, it’s sending something more like “I am here”. But Vera is smart enough to say, something’s up, better see what that node is up to. It then queries the node to see what the status is. The net result is something that is basically “instant status” even though it is not like the direct status from the switch to the controller that a few brands of switches can do. But NIF is not routed, so I would guess that your Vera is within direct range of the switches where this works?

See http://forum.micasaverde.com/index.php?topic=12876.0 for information on the NIF.

I don’t claim to be an expert on this - there is always more to learn. And perhaps at some point in time the GE/Jasco switches did something differently. But I think the NIF is generally how they’ve been working.

12

Yes, the couple of switches that I have are able to communicate directly with the Vera. Most of my house is direct-linked because of the layout. I’m fortunate in that regard.

13

How can you tell if the switch is directly communicating?

14

If it auto-routes first to device “0” - Vera’s Z-Wave chip.
Here is one of my GE/Jasco switches showing direct communication via the Auto Route field: 0-5,6-13,4-15,21-16
Meaning 0 is the first route with a “strength” of 5… (Lower number better) Note mine is UI5…

15

In my VeraPlus, Device 1 is my Zwave. Below is a quick comparison of what I thought were key variables. I noticed that my light giving me trouble does not have “1” as a neighbor. Looking at it physically, I believe it is the closest switch to my controller. Should I add it?

Stairwell (Troublesom light)
Capabilities: 211,156,0,4,16,1,L,R,B,RS,|37,39,53,112,114,115,119,134,150,
NodeInfo: 25,27,35,70,72,73,77,86,96,
Neighbors: 2,4,6,8,9,10,11,12,13,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,
ConsecutivePollFails: 184
PollRatings: 0.00
CommFailure: 1

Hallway (Physically within 6 feet)
Capabilities: 211,156,0,4,16,1,L,R,B,RS,|37,39,83,112,114,115,119,134,
NodeInfo: 25,27,53,70,72,73,77,86,
Neighbors: 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,15,17,18,19,20,
ConsecutivePollFails: 0
PollRatings: 5.00
CommFailure: (variable does not exist)

EDIT: Sorry. Cross posted a different issue into this thread. But we’re heading down the same path here. Quick recap, my stairwell light constantly reports Device not detected. Yet when I send a command or tell my Echo to turn on/off, it works and the device magically is responding again.