I have a GE45609 switch I installed to control my front porch light about 3-4 months ago which replaced an X10 switch. It’s been working just fine all this time. It’s on a scene to turn on and off automatically every day. It’s one of many of those switches I have installed throughout the house and it’s got plenty of neighbors. It’s also located not that far from Vera.
2 nights ago, I noticed it did not go off and was on much later than normal. I turned it off manually. Yesterday it never came on. I went into Vera and it shows it’s state as on, and if I try and turn it off through Vera, it can’t transmit to it after several retries and gives back an error 2. I tried to reconfigure it through Vera and it says it can’t retrieve any info. Now, after doing that, it shows no configuration info any more.
It seems like either the Z-wave transceiver has just died, or it has just completely dropped off the network as if it was deleted.
Is there anyway to determine if it is transmitting at all? And what would the next steps be? Have people experienced a case where the switch just goes bad, or do weird things happen and added devices all of a sudden are not added any more? All the other Z-wave devices I have seem to be working just fine.
So, should I try a repair on the Z-wave network first, or just try excluding and re-adding the switch?
Bruce
Try power cycling the switch. The easiest way is to turn the breaker off.
[quote=“brucehvn, post:1, topic:186327”]Is there anyway to determine if it is transmitting at all?[/quote]With a receiver/scanner/spectrum analyzer sure. Without that, it’s going to be trial and error and a process of elimination.
And what would the next steps be?
Like @garrettwp said, power cycling at the breaker is a great first step. If it were me, I would next try a heal of the device itself, at least. I would even try a heal of the network as a whole, though many people's networks are sufficiently unstable that this introduces new issues, so they recommend against it. I'd give excluding and including the device a try too. If you can exclude and include, then its radio is working and you didn't have to buy a spectrum analyzer to figure it out.
Have people experienced a case where the switch just goes bad, or do weird things happen and added devices all of a sudden are not added any more?
I'm always surprised when people ask this question. Anything can go bad at anytime for any number of reasons and even reasons that seem unlikely/impossible. Your switch is no exception to this and yes, other people have had this switch fail on them. That's not to say that there is an abnormally high [url=https://www.squaretrade.com/htm/pop/lm_failureRates.html]failure rate[/url] for this switch, but 5#!7 breaks all the time.
Thanks Guys. I’ll try resetting the breaker first.
Z-Waver, how do I perform a heal of a single device?
Bruce
[quote=“brucehvn, post:4, topic:186327”]Thanks Guys. I’ll try resetting the breaker first.
Z-Waver, how do I perform a heal of a single device?
Bruce[/quote]
GE has an air gap pull on the bottom of it to kill power only to that switch.
Same as a normal heal except using the ID number of the device. This is in z-wave settings.
Thanks, for pointing this out. I always forget about it when I’m not in front of the switch.
Well, cutting power to the switch and trying a single node heal didn’t work, but excluding and adding the switch got it back working again. It appears somehow that it just got excluded by itself. When I did the exclude, Vera picked up the fact that I hit the switch, but said 0 items excluded.
Thanks for the suggestions.
Bruce
That’s what I was going to suggest. It seems that these systems are not rock solid, and seem to require intervention fairly frequently. At times I have lights on that should not be on, or lights that don’t come on when they are supposed to, but overall it is pretty good. Just not meant for mission critical jobs 
Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk