Guys. I am throwing the 2 scene controllers away! :). The buttons r cracked. It’s harder to push certain buttons cause they get used 20 times a day.
So again better to exclude before I remove them and throw them away?
Thanks!
Yes 
Exclude, reset, bin
C
+1. This is the best way (you can skip reset if you must/wish, but exclude/unpair is the important step).
Hmm I have never scene a device vanish. What I have seen is a device get tagged as “failed” by the nightly heal which makes it continuously shown as “cannot detect” by the vera until that device gets removed and added back, reconfigured or if you can do it that way use another controller to untag it from the zwave chip which can be done only if your zwave chip is on a usb dongle.
So I’ve pretty routinely had devices that I could not exclude/unpair for one reason or another, so Delete was the only option. About 50% of the time, that works, but the other half has left me with an unusable/unconfigurable device. I could try to delete it multiple times, but it always stuck around (with “Can’t configure”). Time and patience has taught me to just leave it, and sure as shoot, overnight the orphan device would just disappear from the UI.
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That’s interesting! In zwave terms, a node can only be deleted if it is first tagged as “failed”.
There are only 3 things one can do if a device so tagged: Untag, delete or replace (That’s where the replace failed device comes in, swapping a device with another with the same node id.)
Going a bit off topic here but if the heal can delete a device from the list, this would be one more reason why I would not want it. What I experienced in the past was when I was going on long trips and a sensor went out of battery (and back then, before 7.0.30 sensors were burning battery quite rapidly) I would come back to a device tagged failed which meant that even with a new battery and a wakeup, the device would constantly be shown as “can’ detect” while it was working just fine. I could run lua code to set failure as false and within 3 minutes it would show again. I found out that this was because the nightly heal tagged this device as failed since it was not responding during the heal. I have never seen it get removed.
I have seen the UI remove a device upon reload when the node id is no longer on the zwave chip though.
Yes, and I think this is the key. Somehow, the deleted node (now failed device) is being removed from the mesh. I’ve always assumed that since it was happening overnight, it was part of the action of the heal.
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Guys I understand what exclude is but what does reset mean?
The steps to an exclusions are:
- The controller sends a reset frame to the device
- The device does a factory reset which are steps varying according the device. It involves deleting its homeid and reset a number of parameters it stores on its zwave chip nvram.
- The controller zwave chip then tags the node as failed and deletes the node id from its device list.
- The UI removes the devices associated with that zwave node.
The device reset only does stop 2 since it does not involve the controller.
The delete from the controller only does step 3 and 4 as it does not involve the device.
Ok so all I am physically doing it putting the device into exclusion mode. Move the controller near the device but what do I do on the controller end?
On the vera, to put the device into exclusion mode, you just go to any device. click on delete and on the menu which pops up, select exclude. After this, manually wake up the device you want to exclude.
Recent experience with this… the pop-up dialog has “Unpair” and “Delete”. “Unpair” is the exclude path you want, which as @rafale77 says, will ask you to wake up the device, which will then be excluded and reset. If you choose “Delete”, the Vera attempts to delete the device without unpairing/excluding it, which should be regarded as “Plan B”. Always try Unpair (exclude) first.
Oh, and make everyone in the house sit still if you have motion sensors and other devices that may be operated while the Vera is in exclusion mode, because ZWave exclusion is promiscuous, and will exclude and reset any and every device that wakes up during that time (not just the one you launched on). Gets me Every. Dang. Time.
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Same here. Took me a long time to figure out what was going on. Drove me nuts!
Yeah weird zwave implementation from some sensors and switches. The exclusion acts on any device which sends a wakeup frame. My sensors don’t so I never had this problem but my leviton switches do so it depends a lot on the device you have. This indeed could be a recipe for a lot of unwanted fun.
I’ve had a Leviton VRCPG for a long time, and it’s sole use is to exclude devices. I can get into and out of exclude in a heartbeat, so I have fewer issues. But of course, yesterday I got lazy excluding a new Zooz ZSE25 that didn’t include correctly, using Vera rather than hauling out the VRCPG, and I’m paying for it today. Sigh.
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I have a zway instance I turn on for things like that!
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You’ll laugh—I first saw this after including a combo motion detector on my test Vera. The inclusion went fine and the device was working. I then excluded an appliance module and was surprised that the motion sensor had also vanished. I couldn’t figure out what I’d done wrong. Re-include the motion detector, no problems, exclude another device—motion detector has vanished again. I finally figured it out–the motion detector is detecting me working on the Vera, sends a wake frame and promptly removes itself!.
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Aeotec Z-Wave stick here.
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Let me guess… you were tripping the sensor waving your arms in despair… 
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Absolutely true!!!