Instant Status vs Enable Polling

[simonmason]

I am still trying to diagnose blockages that occur in my Z-Net periodically where multiple commands appear to get stuck in there and then suddenly show up in Homeseer 30 second later.

As part of doing this it was suggested that I turn Enable Polling off. In doing this I find that a number of my events don't work so I am digging into this.

For example I have a Leviton switch at my basement door. When it is turned on I trigger events to turn on more lights in the basement. The configuration of this switch is attached to the message. I was under the impression it was an instant status reporting switch.

With Enable Polling turned on the events run fine. If I turn off Enable Polling then Homeseer doesn't see the switch turn on or off. So does Enable Polling need to be turned on in order to catch the instant status updates from Z-wave devices that support this?

Thanks for the help.

[akatar]

always buy devices with instant status, so the device itself reports to homeseer if there is a status change.
when it doesn't support instant status you have to poll the device to get it's status, so every x seconds homeseer asks: what's youre status and the device will reply to that.
with lot's of devices there will be a lot off useless traffic.

Perhaps you can use associations to make the device talk to homeseer, please try

[Vit]

I don't have the same exact model of the switch but I have a couple of plug-in old Leviton switches. To HS, they look very similar to your model, and my plugins do not provide unsolicited reporting.
So, it's either polling or a new switch.

[simonmason]

I am still a little confused here. If these switches are not instant status reporting, and I have the polling interval set to zero in homeseer. How are they reporting status?

Most of the time, when I press the switch, Homeseer receives the signal almost immediately. It is only infrequently - perhaps once a day or less, that there is a noticeable delay in homeseer responding.

If this is all being done through polling it would mean it is polling the switches every second in order to respond as quickly as it does. What am I missing here? Thanks

[Guest]

There seems to be conflicting information here. First you say that turning off polling (setting the interval to 0) stops it from working. Then you say it stops it only intermittently. May I ask which is it?

If the problem is intermittent, then you will need to find out just what Homeseer or ZWave is doing when it is failing.

[BobSpen]

Many devices without "instant status" will seem to act like they do have it IF they are in direct contact with the Z-wave receiver. HomeSeer software uses some indication(not an instant status response) to infer that the device may have changed states and does an automatic poll of the device(pseudo instant status). If the device is NOT in direct contact with the Z-wave receiver this mechanism does not work. So if the device in question is sometimes having to make a "hop" to get to the receiver, the pseudo "instant status" will fail. This might explain why it works sometimes and not others?

[simonmason]

Thanks for the replies.

To be clear - I have never changed the polling interval in the device management settings. It has always been zero.

When I say I switched off polling I was referring to the enable polling in the z-wave controller settings - this was suggested as an option by Rupp. As soon as I disable this then this switch and others like it do not report status to Homeseer.

So what I am gathering is that these switches - such as the Leviton DZ15S - are not really instant status and in fact I have just been getting lucky. Most of the time the enable polling is seeing that they turn on or off?