Okay, I’ve had enough of it and I need some help with my system.
Here’s the deal: Vera is slow. At least, it is for me. When I press the button for a scene, it’ll take 1-5 seconds, at which sometimes all the lights will come on immediately, and other times they’ll start turning on in random order. It then takes 1-8 seconds from that first light to the last one. Turning lights off is the same thing, and sometimes it’ll take up to around 30 seconds for the last device to respond.
I’m completely willing to believe that I simply set the system up incorrectly, but I can’t imagine what I would have screwed up. All I know is that if Vera weren’t in the mix, and I was just going from a GE remote to a bunch of lighting devices, the response would be 100% instantaneous. Pressing a scene key would enact that scene immediately, and all devices would react at exactly the same time.
Instead, with Vera it seems like none of the lights react at the same time. It seems like they all go in sequence.
What am I doing wrong? What might Vera be doing wrong? Help!
I’ve got the same issue with my roller shutter closing/opening sequence. The same roller shutter is moving in first, then after 1 or 2 seconds, the move one after the other with about 0.5 second delay between each other.
Is it the case that it sometimes works okay and sometimes doesn’t? Because that’s the issue with me too. I cycled through a bunch of scenes for one room today (slowly, to make sure each scene was getting a chance to finish). About half the time the scenes would work acceptably fast. The other half, they’d take anywhere between 8 and 20 seconds to complete, sometimes taking up to 15 seconds to even start.
At no time are my scenes EVER as fast as if I just pair them directly to a remote.
To add, I’ve wiped this Vera before. I’ve removed and re-added the devices on my network before. I’ve always had these problems.
I am sure Vera Sends the commands sequentially.
I am not sure if waits for a response in between or
send all of the commands then waits for all the responses.
If the latter … it might be sending commands when the earlier devices are sending status back … causing a collision and lost information.
Is this normal for ZWave, though? If that’s what’s causing my issues here, I think it’s pretty clear that it not a better method.
When I was just using the GE remotes with all my lighting gear, the user experience was like magic. It worked perfectly. And this was coming from trying to do scenes with X10 gear, where each light got turned on one after the other, sometimes missing a light or two. Compared to that, my situation with Vera is way better, but it still doesn’t match that experience with the GE remotes.
The GE remotes support multicast, a function of the zwave protocol, to send a message to all devices selected simultaneously. It appears that the zwave device inside the vera either does not, or support for it has not been exploited by mios.
I also experience some delay, intermittently, executing scenes. Take into consideration the processing power of the vera and all the stuff it has to do in order to execute a scene. That might be an issue as well.
Scene controllers allow Multi Casts for associations.
Associations have to be defined in advance.
Associations are not useful for Vera which allows control of individual devices …
And is not oriented to groups of devices, or the groups are arbitrarily grouped (in a scene).
There are a fixed number of associations a device can belong to …
Vera Allows unlimited combination/ordering of device commands …
Different strategies for different requirements.
If you want ultimate speed … you need to go with associations … and limited dynamic control.
I personally think there is a problem with Vera’s Z-Wave handling … causing some of the delays.
I’m sorry, I’m not sure I understand your explanation, but thanks for posting it. I don’t know what you mean by associations and the different strategies you’re talking about.
And Tony G, I don’t understand what processing power would have to do with it. I’m comparing performance to the GE ZWave remotes, after all, so Vera should be able to blow those things away in terms of processing power…
give us more info. Are you using a Vera2 or Vera3? how many devices / plugins you have? what does the scene do exactly (and how many devices it handles?) are you sure you didn’t introduce delays in the scene? if many devices are invoked, make sure you change the order of device operation such that you invoke the devices closer to Vera (or the better-connected devices) before the far away ones. It’s possible that a certain device has a weak Z-Wave connection and Vera is waiting for a reply from it for some reasons before moving on with the rest of the scene.
My impression is that Vera is not using multicast (which would only work for devices that need to receive the same command, e.g. ‘on’, or the same dim level. So things may still need grouped, depending on the diversity of the Vera scene. Z-Wave scenes / scene-capable devices, i.e. moving scene knowledge into the end device is meant to handle that.)
Vera does appear to ‘get stuck’ for a while when unsuccessful in communicating with a particular node. I happened to walk around the house yesterday, testing the lighting outside and in the shed. Response was essentially instant, until I hit an outlet in the shed. Then attempting to control the lighting that was working instantly 20 seconds earlier, was terribly slow. Have not investigated.
I’m using a Vera Lite. No, I don’t have delays in the scenes.
if many devices are invoked, make sure you change the order of device operation such that you invoke the devices closer to Vera (or the better-connected devices) before the far away ones.
??? As far as I can see, there's no way to turn the devices on in any particular order. I just select all the devices at once, and this shouldn't be a challenge anyway. If you're talking about using delays in order to accomplish this, it certainly seems like a PITA, and would still result in a slow scene.
I don’t know if 7 wall switches and 2 lamp modules is a lot of devices. If it is, that’s pretty sad.
It's possible that a certain device has a weak Z-Wave connection and Vera is waiting for a reply from it for some reasons before moving on with the rest of the scene.
I thought the entire idea of ZWave was that there's no such thing as a "weak signal." I don't have a single device that's more than 10 feet from another device, and most are within four feet or right next to each other. The whole point of a mesh network is to eliminate weak signals.
oTi@, is there any solution for this? I don’t believe I’ve ever experienced anything I’d consider “instant” while using Vera. I have noticed that if I’m using the dashboard the response is faster, as is using AutHomation in local mode. Controlling from the GE ZWave remotes seems to be the worst of the bunch.
But still, I just switched between a bunch of scenes in local mode through AutHomation, and while it was faster I definitely wasn’t getting reliable switching. There always seemed to be a light that took longer than the others, or I’d have to press the scene button twice to get it through.
I’d like to set up Vera for friends and family members, but I just don’t find it to be reliable enough…
In order to find your problem, don’t use scenes, switch each load on/off by it self. In my experience, if things get slow, there’s a zwave range problem. You could try to heal, to see if this makes the system more stable.
Thanks, but I still haven’t heard a good explanation as to why there would possibly be any range problem.
The scenes I was having trouble with were ones controlling devices that were mostly within 10 feet of Vera. The ones that were outside that range were then 10-12 feet from those devices, mostly line of sight, a couple through one floor and no walls. Does Vera completely abandon the mesh network aspect of ZWave? If so, I’m going to look for another device.
All that said, I’ve had little to no problems setting scenes with my phone/tablet. Unfortunately, it seems that Vera is completely incapable of properly integrating with the GE ZWave remotes, which is a real shame because, IMO, they’re the ONLY affordable ZWave remotes on the market.
there are other factors at play here: different devices may have different ranges, battery-powered devices do not route. Building material, thickness of walls, and possible interference with other devices like old cordless phones and microwaves can affect signal strength. Sometimes the Z-Wave route discovery is at fault, so a few heals may resolve it, alternatively some had to resort to manual routing: http://forum.micasaverde.com/index.php/topic,13457.0.html
You can find out the order of device invocations, by opening the scene, then going to Advanced. It even shows if there are any explicit delays, and so on. there’s no easy way to change the order other than deleting and adding in proper order.
Look, I’m willing to believe that there are environmental factors, although I don’t have any cordless phones, my microwave isn’t running 24/7, and as I’ve already made clear all these devices are very close to one another, with either nothing in between or maybe a wall that isn’t made of anything special.
It’s looking more and more like the biggest delays are occurring when the commands are sent by the GE remotes. When they’re sent via AutHomation, I’m getting almost no delay (though it’s still not quite as magical as before I got Vera). When I use the GE remotes, that’s when I seem to be getting the worst of it.
Why would this be? Is it because the GE remotes are ZWave devices themselves, and are polling Vera to find out if everything went OK? I’m not exactly that knowledgeable about the finer aspects of this stuff. All I know is that Vera seems to have major issues with the GE remotes, and I hope there’s something MCV can do about that…
i am having similar slowness problems with scenes. My network is even smaller than yours. In one place I have a 4 button Leviton scene controller. One of the buttons just turns on and off one set of lights. It is very slow. I have to wait a long time after turning on the lights before I can turn them off. I tried the heal zwave option. Before I had vera2, I tried the Leviton controller. The scene switches worked much quicker using the Leviton controller. That is the only reason I know it is possible to have a more responsive zwave network. I switched thinking the vera2 would be more flexible. Please help me figure out what makes everything so slow with the vera2 controller.
i did quite alot play with mios and the vera since i have it …
i noticed some “lags” quite regulary, it seems its a chain of issues making this delay to happen.
sequential communication (i can live with that),
i also noticed the response times are ALOT Faster without the network running (disconnected network cable)
but that does pretty much make it just as nice as a hardware remote.
but in general, if the vera “does something” (does not really matter what (anything from consuming electicity to write logs or even controlling somethings)) anything else seem to come to a halt, puts me back to the Windows Feeling i stopped to enjoy a very long time ago
also here in the forum, in 5 out of 10 threads peoples keep telling not to do anything fancy with the vera.
well that was my reason to actually buy it, i can live with 70 device limit, but nobody said that this means 70 devices with zero scenes.
fine 35 devices and 35 scenes would be okay too (including virtual devices even) but that does not seem to be the case.
best case scenario to operate a vera seems to just plug it in to power with no device connected and wooow dont think of creating a scene …
all this is not such a bad thing since we wont watch it do things anyway but a few secounds are a damm long time in 2013, it appears to me that the internal hardware structure does not really support his few little tasks or the kernels are just really bad compiled.
starting to think of decide against buying a z-wave USB and Indigo software instead. (my already 14 Years old iMac does know how to do Multitasking )
was’nt the smartest choice.
Why would a scene switch work more quickly being programmed by a Leviton Controller than a Vera2? It is not even close. If I am doing something wrong, please tell me.
First time poster but long time lurker and unfortunately it had to be in this thread (no offence to the posters!)!
I was using an Aeon Labs USB Stick prior to the Vera Lite and was using the USB stick with Homeseer and also tried a few others (which is a story for another thread!). Frankly, I found Homeseer easy to use and logical (minus the user interface) but was way too pricey. I decided to give the Vera Lite a go and let’s just say it didn’t live up to the expectations. I don’t have a lot of z wave devices nor do I have a huge house but all my z wave devices can be polled and accept commands instantly when using the web interface on Vera or the latest version of Homewave. But come scenes, its a different story. All I can say is that the Vera Lite seems to struggle with them. Sometimes its works with a second of delay, other times it works when it feels like it. Like others have said, without plugins like PLEG (Thanks RT for a great plugin) etc. and the user community the Vera Lite seems to be a beta product still struggling even after UI5.
I have been facing similar problem. I have Vera 3 with almost 44-45 devices & around 20-22 Scenes. Controlling though SQ Remote HD on my iPAD. But its not something which i face regularly.
Usually everything works perfectly fine, like in blink the scene or specific devices start. But when it gets bad, the delay is almost around 3-5 seconds. And that’s pretty bad.
What can be possibly reason for such irregular delay?
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