[SOLVED] Z-wave sluggish or unable to write

Add-ons Bindings
1

Recently i’ve been suffering from poor and/or unreliable z-wave performance in my system.

What are the symptoms?

  • Receiving information is fine: Status updates (e.g. motion, temperature, door status etc) are immediate and never troublesome
  • Sending commands is troublesome: Controlling Z-wave devices (e.g. turning on lights, controlling blinds) is either incredibly slow or it takes multiple tries before the command is executed.

When do these symptoms occur?
The complete unresponsiveness to commands occurs in the first approx. 30 minutes after either a full Openhab restart or a Z-wave binding restart.

After approx. 30 minutes the z-wave system seems to stabilize and becomes responsive again. but even then, when sending commands to groups containing multiple z-wave nodes, some devices (e.g. lights) are not responding to the commands given. When resending the commands the non responding devices do respond.

System information:

  • Openhab version : 2.5.0 build 1677 (openhabian distro)
  • OS: Ubuntu 18.04 on ESXi
  • Nr of Z-wave nodes: 33
  • Z-wave stick: Z-wave.me USB stick
  • Z-wave stick is connected to a RPI3 which in turn is using Ser2Net/Socat to connect to the Openhab VM

Log file containing over 6 hours of z-wave debug:

I’ve never experienced similar issues with Openhab and Z-wave but since a few weeks these issues started to appear and have been bothering me ever since.

@chris, as discussed let’s continue this in this topic. Thanks in advance for your help.
p.s i’ve used your log viewer and noticed a lot of “rejected by controller” messages for various nodes… perhaps something to look at?

Thanks in advance for your thoughts and support!

Br

Roel

2

I have a couple observations:

  • Nodes 61 and 67 (thermostats?) are not behaving well. Lots of timeouts. This can introduce delay in sending commands to other devices.
  • Node 21 appears non-responsive, also causing timeouts. This can introduce delay in sending commands to other devices.
  • The meter reports are very frequent, sometimes a few per second. If that frequency of update is not needed, consider changing the reporting frequency.
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3

Replaced the batteries of the thermostats… they were dead :slight_smile:

Now looking at those meter reports since the Habmin configuration is showing:

  • An update every 10 minutes
  • An update if the consumption varies by 20 watts. (which is not happening every other second for sure)

Thanks for the pointers! will report back with the results

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4

Sure. Post a log file after you fix the above, and I’ll check for any other problems. I stopped looking after I saw the issues with 21, 61, and 67, as they definitely can cause commands to be delayed. But there might be some other things going on.

Sometimes the device config can be out of sync with what HABmin shows. Once you’ve fixed 21, 61, and 67, updating the meter config parameters from HABmin might restore the frequency to what you want.

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5

Lowered the report interval and now the Z-wave debug log seems calm and quiet.
But more importantly… it appears my z-wave device are responding fast and reliable again!

Thank you for the advise!

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6

Good job Roel!
Please update thread title to included [SOLVED]
and put a check in the box for the post which helped you fix your issue
Thanks!

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