Vera3 Z-Wave failure, what to do next!

Community Playground General Discussions
1

TL;DR – Am trying to decide if I should stick with Vera3, upgrade to VeraEdge, or move to another solution. Any shared experiences, or punching holes in my pro/con considerations are appreciated.

Full Story:

After 215 days of usage, I was presented with “ZWave: Failed To Start” error message, and been thrown back into the dark ages of having to manually activate things around the house again >:(

Vera tech support has been working with me to trying to resolve it, but after more than a week it is not looking very promising. With over 50 devices, some buried in hard to access spots my main nightmare is having to redo the Z-Wave pairing.

Even went as far as to restore my Vera3 backup on to the functional Vera3 unit of my neighbor (after a factory reset), and even though the “ZWave: Failed To Start” error is gone, I now got the sad ‘red’ house saying that all devices are no longer connected.

Healing the Z-Wave network came back with “Heal Stage: SUCCESS! Z-Wave network heal successful” after running for many hours, but all devices are still listed under the “Failed devices” list.

Now I could just ship in my Vera3 for RMA, get some refurb unit back, but then it is possibly just waiting for the next failure, and more than likely still be forced to have to redo my Z-Wave pairing. Have a ton of Z-Wave Plus devices, so a VeraEdge upgrade would be perfect time I guess, but then what is going to be the reliability on that one.

I have Schlage deadbolts, and a Nest Thermostat, so compatibility with those are the main drivers in any alternatives I might pursue.

[ul][li]Fibaro Home Center Lite[/li]
[li]Zipato ZipaBox[/li]
[li]HomeSeer 3 software[/li][/ul]

These are the three main solutions I found that support Z-Wave including secure command class, and my Nest Thermostat.

HomeSeer is running a 50% off special this month so it is only $125 right now, but I would be forced to purchasing the $40 Nest plugin for it, and the $100 for the HS3Touch Designer software looks like a given as well. That is still cheaper then the $300 for the HS3Pro that has the designer included, because I would still need to purchase the Nest plugin for that one as well. The other benefits that HS3Pro offers do not seem to apply to my situation (unless I totally read the “versus” overview wrong).

Have an Aeon-Labs S2 stick still, and I can obtain a GigaByte BRIX cheaper then what HomeSeer is trying to sell them for rebranded as their “controllers”.

There is also the open-source OpenHAB solution that is tempting, but I am really tired of the amount of time wasted, and do not mind paying for something (within reason) if it will just “work”. I originally started out with the open-source HomeGenie solution, but it doesn’t support Schlage deadbolts, or Nest thermostats so I was quickly forced to push it to the side.

Or am I just freaking out over nothing, and the failure on my Vera3 is just one of those statistical anomalies that I was unlucky on. I mean for all I know the Aeon-Labs S2 sticks fails when I start to really rely on it.

Any shared story on reliability experiences would therefore be appreciated as well.

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Mine isn’t 1 year old either and has been having problems lile yours… corruption

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My UI7 Vera3 decided to puke on me today as well . Any access via the web UI comes up with a ‘Luup engine is taking longer to reload.’ error. Power cycling did not resolve it. I can SSH in and the LUA init log has an error 245 in it.

Seems like she is still running and house mode is in Away mode. I’m getting a lot of ‘sensor tripped’ notifications when I am moving around the house that is consistent with that mode.

Hopefully Vera will be able to remote into it tomorrow and resuscitate her. It looks like some kind of software corruption rather than a hardware failure.

4

Status update:

Have done some initial HomeSeer testing, and after dealing with some learning curve plus node update struggles, it becomes clear that each solution has their own pros and cons. Done enough testing though to already know that HS3 will be well equipped to handle my existing configuration, and the complex expansion plans that I have in mind. Running everything on a small AMD E350 mini-PC, and everything is super responsive.

Today will be about OpenHAB, and since the Aeon-Labs S2 stick still contains all the Z-Wave network node info from my HomeSeer testing it will be interesting to see how easy it is to migrate between different solutions.

Having the S2 stick allowed me to test the software out much easier, as I am very reserved to invest money in a Zipato Zipabox or Fibaro Home Center. The Z-Wave hardware failure on the Vera3 really opened my eyes as to how dangerous the vendor lock-in is for that critical part on an HA network. At least the Aeon-Labs S2 stick at $35 is cheap enough to purchase a spare and clone the Z-Wave network on as a backup, or upgrade to a Z-Wave+ alternative when they drop in cost. HomeSeer is selling a network based Z-Wave+ module, but it is almost the same cost of a VeraEdge, and I rather just wait for Aeon-Labs to release their new controller (Philio has a $28 controller with 500-series chipset, so might give them a try). Aeon-Labs has been good to me though, and considering the fast upgrade to the 500-series chipset they are doing to their entire product line, it should not be long. Next week they are launching a lot of new items, and already have items in pre-order.

At least for now there is backward & forward-compatability support on Z-Wave, so I can keep adding new Z-Wave+ modules, and control them just fine with the older generation S2 stick.

I am still interested to hear feedback from others, especially their experiences. Perhaps somebody tried HomeSeer out already and returned back to Vera. Or anybody who had an Aeon-Labs S2 stick fail?

5

Waiting to hear back from Vera Support as to what they did, but as of this morning (2 weeks, and one day after it all went down) the Vera3 is working again.

If they can explain to me what happened, and a quicker way to restore it myself if it ever happens again in the future (or preferably a permanent fix to their firmware) then I’ll be happy to stick with Vera.

The HomeSeer solution did open up a few new extra possabilities, but need to do a lot more testing. At least I can do that thoroughly this time, and not have to rush things to get my home automated again (at least before end of the month when 50% offer ends).

6

Tired of the hardware/software problems I’ve had with my Vera3, I have decided to give HS3 a try. So far it’s a lot more complicated (there’s always a massive learning curve with me), but WOW, it looks like it’s WAY WAY more versatile, and I’m not tied to a particular hardware platform. This, I think, is the best “feature”…

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[quote=“RoChess, post:5, topic:187249”]Waiting to hear back from Vera Support as to what they did, but as of this morning (2 weeks, and one day after it all went down) the Vera3 is working again.

If they can explain to me what happened, and a quicker way to restore it myself if it ever happens again in the future (or preferably a permanent fix to their firmware) then I’ll be happy to stick with Vera.[/quote]

Did you ever hear what they did to fix it? I’ve just hit the error, and the issue sounds basically the same as yours.

8

Vera support are now telling me to open it, check if the controller is loose or go and buy another one (uh, no. I’ll get a z-wave stick and run home-assistant.io instead). Anyone manage to work out how to manually reflash the zwave controller?

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For anyone else searching for this in the future, Vera were unable to resolve the issue. They asked me if the device was near metal (seems pointless requesting that as the device clearly fails to discover the zwave controller - it’s not a range/transmission/antenna issue), and said they can’t assist further.

They also were unable to confirm if restoring a backup to a new device would restore the network without reconfiguration. Guess my run with Vera is over and I’ll try home-assistant.io with a z-wave usb stick instead (functionality seems similar, with a more active developer community and 3rd party plugins).