Vera Plus not activating devices

Community Playground General Discussions
1

My Vera Plus seems to be having trouble communicating with my devices. This started yesterday. I am able to log in to my dashboard and see all my devices, but they do not respond to commands, USUALLY.

All my devices are shown, but their status is not correct. My thermostats show a different temp from what they are displaying locally.

The few devices I’ve tried to operate, do not operate, at least not right away and not consistently. I turned on a wall switch via the software, the “spinner” spins, then I get underneath the device name the following message - “Sending the Z-Wave command after 0 retries.” Eventually I get “Send: No Response Frame”. On another device (wall switch) the same thing happens, but sometimes the device the switch is hooked to turns on. I cannot get it to turn off via the software, but can turn it off with the wall switch. At no point does the software indicate that it is switched on, regardless of it’s actual state.

This seems to be the same situation for all my devices and scenes. The scenes show they have run at their proper time, but in fact they did not.

I took a look at the Vera Plus controller and saw that the zwave light was not lit. When I moved the unit, the zwave light came on, but that had no impact on the accuracy of the responses I’m getting.

Any suggestions/help would be appreciated. I have not powered down the VP yet, waiting for any suggestions.

I’m running Windows 10, Application Version: 1.7.3232

thanks for any help
Brian

2

Lacking any response from the members here, I decided to reboot my Vera. It seemed to do the trick. That was two days ago. Tonight things are starting to go screwy again. My vera dashboard does not report the correct status of a number of my components, a switch, a plug-in module and the two thermostats.

BUT - when I opened my front door, which has a scene activated upon opening, all the correct devices turned on. My dashboard shows them on. But my dashboard is still showing incorrect status of the switch, the plug and the two thermostats. I also cannot turn off the devices that were turned on by the scene.

Please help. Vera has always been the rock in my system, I hate to think I need to replace it.

3

Sounds like something got corrupted.
Upload one of your backups and see if that fixes it.

4

If restoring a backup per zedrally’s instructions does not help. I suggest logging a trouble ticket with our Customer Care as well.
See my signature for details.

5

Thanks for the responses.

Last night I contacted customer support and he fixed the problem (I hope!). The tech was very knowledgeable and efficient.

Here’s what went wrong in case anyone else has this issue.

The tech first identified that I was running out of memory on my VP.

Then he tracked down what was causing this - a failed device, a recently installed hardware device that plugs into the wall. It has the ability to monitor energy use and was causing the VP to log the polling failures. Apparently the number of these logs became so great that the memory was almost filled, causing VP to attempt to juggle it’s remaining free memory. I had installed two of these devices and the tech was able to pinpoint which one had failed.

He removed the device from my system, cleared the logs and cache and restarted my controller. All seems to be working now. All my scenes operated correctly this morning.

Score one for the customer support team at Vera!

But this raised a number of questions -

Is Vera so fault intolerant that a failed device can bring down the whole system? This seems like it would be a fairly common scenario given the number of devices we all have on our systems.

As everyone’s systems mature (a polite way of saying getting older) we will all be experiencing device failures. Unless Vera wants to spend more money on customer support people to track down and identify customer problems (and the inherent bad rep that Vera will get as a result of customers experiencing problems), I suggest they pay their programmers now to fix this issue.

Also, when trying to identify the cause of Vera’s memory issues he suggested I remove some apps that are not needed. He identified two apps that have been added by Vera and cannot be removed -

Sercomm IP Camera and Amazon Alexa Helper

I don’t know why they can’t be removed, but I don’t want them on my system until I decide to add those components. They are just taking up memory, exasperating any memory problems that may arise.

I hope this is taken as constructive criticism, not ranting about Vera.