Enable/disable polling checkbox

[larrywal32]

I was on the phone with Homeseer tech support a few days ago who were helping me get my smartstick configured, and at one point they told me to check a box to disable polling (because I was dealing with a z wave plus device that didn't need it).

I can't remember what it was for...whether a specific device, or the controller or what.

Now I'm trying to go back to unset what I had (not sure if it's causing other issues) and I can't find the checkbox. Where in the HS3 UI is a checkbox that says "enable polling"?

On a different (but related) note, I have a Homeseer motion/temp/luminance sensor and other devices that currently say their polling time is zero. Does that mean auto? or off?

[tome10]

Polling is in the zwave tab on all devices. Some old devices did not instantly update HS with their status change, so you set the polling for HS to reach out and ask for the status. You can't poll battery devices because they sleep. Supposedly you don't need to poll the newer devices, but I was messing around with mission critical data retrieval, and was having issues with devices not updating so I set the polling to every minute, and seems to have cleared my issues up. Supposedly it's not good to poll because it congests the zwave queue and causes issues. And, you're not supposed to set up polling on the root device as it polls all it's children which would compound the congestion, so if you do poll, only poll on the device you need ie Temperature etc.

[larrywal32]

So, I have an HSM200....and when I go to the temperature device, the settings area under the function group is disabled. And polling interval is set to zero.

The only device I can get to the temperature polling time on is the root device (where I can set temp polling directly). I guess that's just a function of the device and I should still set it in the root?

[tome10]

I have 6 of those, and I don't have the polling enabled as they seem to be rock solid. The polling is on the zwave tab above I think where youre talking about. There's a pencil there to edit the polling. The function group that is grayed out is where you would go to the root device to edit. If you're at the temp device, zwave tab, and you don't see the pencil/edit polling, I'm not sure what's going on.

[sooty]

I was on the phone with Homeseer tech support a few days ago who were helping me get my smartstick configured, and at one point they told me to check a box to disable polling (because I was dealing with a z wave plus device that didn't need it).

I can't remember what it was for...whether a specific device, or the controller or what.

Now I'm trying to go back to unset what I had (not sure if it's causing other issues) and I can't find the checkbox. Where in the HS3 UI is a checkbox that says "enable polling"?

On a different (but related) note, I have a Homeseer motion/temp/luminance sensor and other devices that currently say their polling time is zero. Does that mean auto? or off?

The "enable polling" checkbox you are referring to can be found by going to the Manage Plug-Ins page and clicking on the Z-Wave plug-in name in the left "Plug-In" column.

Paul..

[larrywal32]

@Paul - ahhh thanks! If I have some non Zwave Plus devices, should I turn this back on even though most of my stuff is plus?

@Tome - I do see the pencil and zero on the temp device as you do. But on the root device, if you expand settings, it does have an interval to report temp (and light, etc...). I guess maybe that's different from polling? I don't see any settings for motion....not sure if the UI is set to update frequently enough maybe to test by using only the device mgmt page....

[sooty]

@Paul - ahhh thanks! If I have some non Zwave Plus devices, should I turn this back on even though most of my stuff is plus?

I'm not 100% sure what that setting does. I'm thinking it's a "master switch" for Z-Wave polling so if you have polling set up on some nodes then this switch will save switching it on/off on each individual device.

You will need to establish if polling is required on a node by node basis. I have a mix of plus and older 4.5x devices and don't do any regular polling at all because most of my devices report instant status.

I do have some plug-in appliance modules that report the On/Off status and Power Usage values without polling however they also report Amps, Volts and Power Factor but these need to be polled to get up-to-date values. I don't need those values for anything so I just don't bother polling them.

What you may find is that when adding some types of new nodes the Z-Wave plug-in has a nasty habit of setting all sorts of unnecessary polling and / or associations. Whenever I add a new node (thankfully this is now an infrequent occurrence) I just remove everything that HS sets up and configure it manually.

Paul..

[randy]

@Paul - ahhh thanks! If I have some non Zwave Plus devices, should I turn this back on even though most of my stuff is plus?

@Tome - I do see the pencil and zero on the temp device as you do. But on the root device, if you expand settings, it does have an interval to report temp (and light, etc...). I guess maybe that's different from polling? I don't see any settings for motion....not sure if the UI is set to update frequently enough maybe to test by using only the device mgmt page....

As Paul wrote above, the "Enable Polling" on the Z-Wave configuration page turns off polling for all devices. When it is enabled it resumes the scheduled polling for all devices configured for polling on their Z-Wave configuration tab. Only devices with specific polling schedules are automatically polled. This checkbox is a great diagnostic tool when tracking down Z-Wave command delays. Using the checkbox to disable polling will quickly let you know if excessive polling is causing problems.

For Z-Wave devices if polling is scheduled for a root device, all child devices are polled as well. If a child device is scheduled for polling, only that device is polled.

Scheduled polling is not necessary for Z-Wave plus devices or for legacy devices that support instant status.

Any device (legacy instant status or Z-Wave plus) will not be synchronized if their state is changed while HomeSeer is not running. For that reason I manually poll all critical Z-Wave devices at startup. This Event driven polling takes place regardless of any scheduled polling or lack thereof.

Polling is a request of the device. Reporting as configured in a Z-Wave device's settings, is initiated by the device. This reporting is not affected by whether Z-Wave polling is enabled and scheduled or not. Energy and other reporting initiated by settings can also be initiated by polling. For instance a "Watts" child scheduled to report every 5 minutes, will report every 5 minutes on its own. If the child is polled it will report when polled as well.

When setting polling on legacy devices, there are a few considerations

• Only poll as frequently as needed for the device. Figure out how "fresh" the status needs to be based upon the type of Events being triggered by or Conditioned upon the device's status
• Try to stagger polling so that they don't all happen at once. If you want to poll a device every 20 minutes, add or subtract a few seconds to each device so that (over time) they will end up being spread out. Add a different offset to every device having the same general polling needs. One device at 20m, 1s and the next at 20m, 2s, etc. When HomeSeer starts, polling is started on all devices. The longer HomeSeer runs, the more spread out this polling will become.
• Polling the device creates twice as much Z-Wave traffic as having the device report on its own, since polling requires HomeSeer to request the report rather than the device initiating it on its own.
• There is no need to be afraid of polling when needed, but excessive polling can cause delays in Z-Wave command processing.

[Wade]

Randy, thank you for the thorough and informative explanation.

[tome10]

I had no idea that page was there.

[jvm]

It seems to me its a bad idea to completely disable polling even with Z-Wave Plus devices having instant status update, though you might want to set a longer polling period.

Here's the scenario of concern: let's say you have HomeSeer with polling disabled and all of your devices are reporting properly and have proper status. Then you shut down HomeSeer or it crashes. During that time, a device changes status and sends an instant status message, but it is not received by HomeSeer. When you re-start HomeSeer, it is then out of sync with the current status of the devices. If you have polling enabled, it will eventually recover the proper state. This scenario is particularly concerning for security devices such as locks (you might thing all the doors are locked and close because the state is wrong, even if some doors are actually unlocked/open) If polling is disabled, the state will be wrong until the device undergoes another change and provides an updated status message or you manually poll the devices. Since you can't count on someone remembering to manually poll, then it seems you should keep some polling active. A better approach might be for Homeseer to initiate a poll of all devices during startup (perhaps spacing each poll message by 0.5 seconds or so to avoid a flood of poll messages, but still obtaining sync.).

Granted, this is likely a "rarely happens" scenario, but since polling easily addresses it, it seems like something one would want to consider.

Am I missing something here (i.e., is there some way that proper state would be recovered even without polling when HomeSeer re-starts)?

Also note that in order to avoid a flood of polling messages all at the same time, I generally try to set the polling period slightly different for each device (i.e., 15m, 15m 1s, 15m 2s, etc.)

[NetworkGuy]

Scheduled polling is not necessary for Z-Wave plus devices or for legacy devices that support instant status.

Any device (legacy instant status or Z-Wave plus) will not be synchronized if their state is changed while HomeSeer is not running. For that reason I manually poll all critical Z-Wave devices at startup. This Event driven polling takes place regardless of any scheduled polling or lack thereof.

It seems to me its a bad idea to completely disable polling even with Z-Wave Plus devices having instant status update, though you might want to set a longer polling period.

Here's the scenario of concern: let's say you have HomeSeer with polling disabled and all of your devices are reporting properly and have proper status. Then you shut down HomeSeer or it crashes. During that time, a device changes status and sends an instant status message, but it is not received by HomeSeer. When you re-start HomeSeer, it is then out of sync with the current status of the devices.

Randy, is there a way to force a polling update at startup to address an out-of-sync scenario (e.g. event or script)?

[jvm]

I was thinking of adding code to the Startup.vb to poll devices during startup, but using a delay to prevent flooding the network with polling messages. I think code along the following lines might work but I haven't tested it (though, as the prior poster suggested, I'd prefer to see an "official" HomeSeer implementation as I assume they'd better understand how to best implement something like this and at what point in the script to insert it):

Dim enumerator As Object
Dim dev As Object

enumerator = hs.GetDeviceEnumerator

'If Not isNull(enumerator) Then
Do While Not enumerator.Finished
dev = enumerator.GetNext()

If dev.dev_type_string = "Z-Wave Door Lock" Or dev.dev_type_string = "Z-Wave Switch Binary" Or dev.dev_type_string = "Z-Wave Switch Multilevel" Then

hs.PollDevice(dev.hc + dev.dc)
hs.WaitSecs 1

End If
Loop

[randy]

Randy, is there a way to force a polling update at startup to address an out-of-sync scenario (e.g. event or script)?

I do not know of any way to force polling of all devices, other than the button on the Device Manager Page. It will poll all visible (pollable) devices. You could call that function by launching the url http://HomeSeerIP/deviceutility?polldevices=yes, but it would depend on the filtering imposed on that page.

I have requested it in the past, but HST stated there was not a function to poll all devices. Ill guess there is a scripting function to poll a device, but I do not know what it is. If you could find that function, it would be easy to build a quick script to step through all Z-Wave devices and poll them one at a time.

That is why, as I wrote above, I poll critical devices at startup.

[NetworkGuy]

Thanks Randy. I read your response and highlighted it as well, but completely missed the word "manual". :-(

Would be nice to have something automated that could be added to the startup script (or an event) to sync up network devices after a system restart (planned or unplanned).