I thought I'd share something that was something of a surprise to me.
I have about 35 z-wave devices in two different buildings with two z-wave controllers (ethernet). I've been using HS for about 5 years. I had added about 6 z-wave devices in the last few weeks, and I was experiencing a lot of problems with the network. I was getting very, very slow responses (>30 seconds to turn on a light). I was also not getting updates on some of the devices, like power/watts and sensor data, to the point I had to initiate polling on the parent, and in some cases, the child devices - otherwise it would never update automatically, and I mean never, and no error notification. I had to write a script that would periodically read the update time on the devices, and send a notification if the last update was more than a minute ago, because updates would stop with nothing observable. I was also experiencing repeated errors like "can't reach node XX".
I did what I thought was the recommended action: optimization! I optimized the full network several times, and did a full (return route) optimization several times. Repeated this many, many times. Tried a z-seer optimization as well. For those devices that still had problems I optimized the device from it's z-wave page. I must have optimized dozens of times.
Then I finally dug this out - a post from TWO YEARS ago by rjh, which in part says:
https://forums.homeseer.com/forum/li...works-11-12-18
The post is deeply, deeply buried in a forum on plugins (HS3 only), under "lighting", although my problem had nothing to do with lighting.
I first got rid of all the polling I had set up, and did the above suggestion. I worked like a miracle. I have near instantaneous response, and all the automatic device updates are working like a charm. So the answer was to NOT use the HS options that appears in many places. Hmmmm.......
I would have never figured this out myself. To make matters worse, I found a least 20 posts on "slow z-wave" or "optimization", most of which recommended what I've been doing for YEARS - optimize! Partial 3 times, full optimize after that. Some of them said re-install the z-wave plugin, or erase the z-wave DB and restart, or delete the devices and restore them from the network controllers. Tried these all, for days and days.
The real issue I would point out is that this is not part of any documentation for Homeseer, that I could find. This forum is GREAT, but in this case it wasted days and days of my time because there were too many posts and suggestions. These types of "best practices" need to be captured, reviewed, locked, and made sticky. Is there any place to do so? Is there any community action (like WiKi's do, and Wikipedia, although I think these don't always work) to provide user-generated documentation?. The critical part is moderation, review, and posting by forum administrators. Does anybody do this, even on a part time basis? And don't say you're too busy, because I'm busy too.
I have about 35 z-wave devices in two different buildings with two z-wave controllers (ethernet). I've been using HS for about 5 years. I had added about 6 z-wave devices in the last few weeks, and I was experiencing a lot of problems with the network. I was getting very, very slow responses (>30 seconds to turn on a light). I was also not getting updates on some of the devices, like power/watts and sensor data, to the point I had to initiate polling on the parent, and in some cases, the child devices - otherwise it would never update automatically, and I mean never, and no error notification. I had to write a script that would periodically read the update time on the devices, and send a notification if the last update was more than a minute ago, because updates would stop with nothing observable. I was also experiencing repeated errors like "can't reach node XX".
I did what I thought was the recommended action: optimization! I optimized the full network several times, and did a full (return route) optimization several times. Repeated this many, many times. Tried a z-seer optimization as well. For those devices that still had problems I optimized the device from it's z-wave page. I must have optimized dozens of times.
Then I finally dug this out - a post from TWO YEARS ago by rjh, which in part says:
- Clear all routes. To do this, from the Z-Wave plugin back up your Z-Wave interface, then restore it. (NOTE: UZB sticks or Z-Nets with UZB sticks DO NOT support restoring Z-Wave backups) This erases the interface which removes all the nodes and routes. Then do a restore which restores all the nodes. Restart the plugin and ensure that you can still control nodes that are close to the controller.
- At this point the controller has NO routes and will only use direct communication. Run a node connectivity test and see if it can reach all your nodes. If so, you are done, you do not need to optimize anything.
https://forums.homeseer.com/forum/li...works-11-12-18
The post is deeply, deeply buried in a forum on plugins (HS3 only), under "lighting", although my problem had nothing to do with lighting.
I first got rid of all the polling I had set up, and did the above suggestion. I worked like a miracle. I have near instantaneous response, and all the automatic device updates are working like a charm. So the answer was to NOT use the HS options that appears in many places. Hmmmm.......
I would have never figured this out myself. To make matters worse, I found a least 20 posts on "slow z-wave" or "optimization", most of which recommended what I've been doing for YEARS - optimize! Partial 3 times, full optimize after that. Some of them said re-install the z-wave plugin, or erase the z-wave DB and restart, or delete the devices and restore them from the network controllers. Tried these all, for days and days.
The real issue I would point out is that this is not part of any documentation for Homeseer, that I could find. This forum is GREAT, but in this case it wasted days and days of my time because there were too many posts and suggestions. These types of "best practices" need to be captured, reviewed, locked, and made sticky. Is there any place to do so? Is there any community action (like WiKi's do, and Wikipedia, although I think these don't always work) to provide user-generated documentation?. The critical part is moderation, review, and posting by forum administrators. Does anybody do this, even on a part time basis? And don't say you're too busy, because I'm busy too.
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