Multiple Devices Suddenly Reporting Incorrect States

Not really sure if there is a more specific board to pose this question to, but as I have several different devices being affected by my current issue, I figured the General board was the best place to go.

I have a Vera Edge running UI7 (v1.7.2607, the latest version) with approximately 30+ z-wave devices of all types in my network. Lately, and for no apparent reason, my Vera edge has been reporting the incorrect state for multiple devices seemingly at random. The devices affected are both battery powered, and electrically powered. My devices being affected by the issue are three Aeon Labs Door/Window sensors (DSB04100-ZWUS), a Yale Real Living Z-Wave Deadbolt and a GE Z-Wave Dimmer Switch. At random, these devices report incorrect states (The sensors show tripped when they’re really not, the deadbolt reports as unlocked when it’s really locked, and the dimmer on when it’s really off). This is exceedingly frustrating because many of these sensors and the lock are tied into security scenes I have set up which instantly trip as soon as I leave the house because the sensors are reading that they’re already in the tripped state.

I tried the obvious solution, at least for the battery powered devices, by putting brand new batteries in. No luck there. I’ve then attempted to re-configure all the devices that have shown to be affected by this issue. This will temporarily solve the problem by putting each device back into the proper state, but doesn’t solve it permanently because they will eventually go back to showing the incorrect state. Being that the door/window sensors are all battery powered, they need to be set to “wake up” individually by hitting the tamper button three times rapidly on each before they will accept a “poll” or “configure” command, which forces me to try to correct each sensor’s state individually. This makes it even more annoying to try to fix each to its correct state each time it happens. I have the latest firmware, and haven’t updated for quite sometime so I don’t believe this problem was caused by a firmware update. I also did not change the locations of these sensors or the places they’re affixed, so I can’t see anything really interfering with these sensors and devices. I have many other Aeon Labs Door/Window sensors that aren’t affected by this issue, as well as another Yale Real Living Deadbolt that remains unaffected and another GE Dimmer Switch that is not affected. The problem seems specific to the three sensors, the one deadbolt, and on occasion, the one GE Dimmer switch. The incorrect reporting of state changes seemed to affect all the currently affected devices at about the same time.

What else can I try to solve this issue??

I have ( had?) Similar problems with this, only worse since I have about 85 devices. I also have recently encountered similar problems to other problems posted recently in the forum. In the last few days the display of the status of many devices has been incorrect. This has included not only light switches and outlets, but also locks and sensors. I explored many things that I’m not going to repeat here, but I just found one thing that may have fixed the problem (Only Time Will Tell). Over the past few months I have been converting from vera3 UI5 to Vera Plus UI7. I have been bouncing back and forth, but more on that later.

Per tech At vera, I have been individually excluding devices from vera3, then including to vera plus. (Had some trouble with a lock and a thermostat , but more on that later .) Excluded devices did disappear from vera3. Sometime after including them into vera plus, many of those devices reappeared in vera3. They appeared with their original names. Since I had already unpaired them, I went through and deleted each one individually. Everything looks good. Then I did something , not sure what, and 45 of them reappeared as_appliance module with the message “device failed to configure” . This morning it occurred to me that maybe the two controllers were interfering with each other now that they both , I think, thought they had the same devices and this was causing the status display problems. So, I unplugged the vera3 , and Wala, the display problem has apparently gone away for the vera plus devices. I plugged vera3 back in, and everything still seems okay although the phantom devices are still there ( I picked that name up from another thread). Through all this, control of the devices still work , it was just the display that was wrong . Not true for the locks however. So, bottom line, if you have two or more controllers you might check out this situation.

CORRECTION/ADDITION:
( It just occurred to me that last week I attempted to move the vera3 into the rental cabin we have next door. My wife maintains the pin codes for the lock and we monitor the temperature in the living room and in the crawlspace . Then I encountered a problem with the IP address , probably because of a Wi-Fi extender I have over there . At any rate, I screwed up the IP address and could not get at the vera3 anymore. I put in a request to Vera Support to find out how to get the IP address changed without being able to get at the vera3 , and after not receiving any response, I reset vera3 and loaded a backup from the week before . Now I suspect that that backup was taken prior to excluding many of the devices from the vera3 and that’s why they reappeared. And now the question is, since those devices are already included on the vera plus , how do I get them off the vera3 again, DELETE THEM OR EXCLUDE THEM AGAIN FROM THE VERA3?)

I have , or maybe had?, Another similar problem that I saw in another thread. The delays in my scenes have not been working lately . One worked this morning, but that was before I unplugged vera3, so I doubt if that was a related problem. Also, I don’t know if it is still a problem. I have had to create additional scenes to reverse the action I have scheduled and other scenes , e.g. I used to have a scheduled scene to turn the water heater off at night and then have the water heater come on after an eight hour delay, but now I have to schedule turning it back on in a second scene .

I just tested a motion sensor and a door sensor delays and they did not work , whereas they used to. (I just realize something and now I have to go back up above and make a major correction/addition.) I think I will stop now discussing current problems until I get the above situation corrected. I have a few other things to reLate though.

Concerning the problem I had transferring one of my Schlage locks from the old controller to the new. After trying a variety of methods for excluding and including it, I finally had to do a factory reset . The other two locks worked okay (well, relatively speaking ).

I have a trane thermostat . I could not get it to exclude from vera3 or include to vera plus. I read all the instructions and all the posts I can find and nothing worked until I found a post that said you had to hold the Vera to within an inch of the thermostat . I tried that and it worked.

As I mentioned above, I have been bouncing back and forth between vera3 and vera plus for the last few months. I have never put the rental cabin stuff on VeraPlus, it has remained on vera3 until I have a lot of confidence in vera plus. The reason I wanted to change to veraPlus was for distance and performance. The rental cabin is 60 to 70 feet from the house . There is a shed between them that I have a Z wave lightbulb in. This acts as a relay, but I didn’t want to rely on that . It sometimes took too long (for us) for a new pin code to register in the lock in the cabin. I was hoping that with the extended distance of the VeraPlus that performance would be improved.

For the past half-hour I have been trying to post some pictures of the network quality graphs produced by AltUI showing before Vera Plus and after vera plus. Unfortunately I keep getting a message that says they’re too big despite the fact that they’re much smaller than maximum requirement. So words will have to do. When I just had the vera3, practically all the quality lines were red . After installing Veraplus, most of the quality lines were green for devices attached to the vera plus, and mostly red for the devices still attached to vera3. This seems to verify my hope that the quality of the network would get better with the Vera Plus.

I have to resolve the vera3 phantom device problem before I can draw any more conclusions about the zwave network.