My Vera Edge controller was worked rock solid past 2 years and I did hardly make any changes or add devices I have around 60 zwave nodes. And next to that quite some Hue lights with AltHue plugin, I use Reactor Sensor plugin and Switchboad Plugin for all the automation. So no use of Vera scenes.
The Edge is running on firmware 7.30 (1.7.4969)
But since a couple of weeks some zwave devices reacted very slowly and later not anymore.
Since yesterday much more devices did not react anymore (“Can’t detect device anymore”).
So today I decided to restore a backup of dec 2022 (the last one I saved after adding a zwave device and that I’m sure was working correctly. But that seems to made it even worse. Hardly any zwave device still works: this counts for all the mains powered devices. Some of the motion- and doorwindow sensors still seem to work. All plugins and Reactor Scenes still work (at least as far as they don’t use zwave devices).
Could it be that one of the zwave devices is defect or corrupt causing the whole zwave network to fail ?
At zwave settings - advanced I see options “Reset zwave network” and “Reset zwave chip”
I have no clue what they do./…
So who can help me to solve this big problem or at least find the root cause ?
I too have noticed delays and lags of late that I never noticed before and my system is 8+ years old.
It hasn’t got to the unusable point for me yet but I will confess its a bit annoying after so many years of flawless usage.
I wonder if you are experiencing co-channel interference on the RF front. ZWave operates in the ISM band (in USA) using the 908-916MHz portion. This is an unlicensed band so other equipment might be using the same spectrum. Did you get a new cordless phone recently? WiFi is allowed to operate on 900MHz band but I don’t know of any that do, they tend to be 2.4, 5, and 6 GHz. Some type of wireless TV bridging system to share video around the home? Wireless ethernet? New set top box with MoCA in it (even through via coax there could be leakage radiation)? 900MHz remote controls for TV, AV, garage door, …
I would try shutting things off (one at a time) that are new and try to do a A/B test of a ZWave device. See if you can correlate the problem to something new in the home.
Is your home router sitting inches from Vera? Try a longer ethernet cord and separate these boxes by 6’-10’ as an experiment. Signals fall off per an inverse squared rule so adding some separation can hugely reduce an interfering signal. There maybe leakage interference from the router in the 900MHz band still within FCC part 15 spec but high enough to degrade Vera’s receiver. This is called receiver desensitization because the interfering signal steals away the bottom end of sensitivity.
Anyway get into Sherlock Holmes mode and just try a few experiments. Might be something simple in the end. Just a few thoughts.
@curiousB thanks for your reply!
In the meantime I solved the issue and everything works fine again.
What I did:
- enabled the nightly heal (I disabled it a couple of years ago)
- replaced batteries of 2 motion sensors
I don’t know if empty batteries of the motion sensors played a role but anyway everything woirks again.
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