Z-Wave Best Practice Question

I have a weatherproof Z-Wave module that I use for Christmas lights and after the holidays I simply unplugged it without excluding it. One thing I observed was that my all-lights group was affected by this. If I performed an all-lights-off operation as I do each night, there was a 10-20 second delay in turning off the z-wave lights. Once I removed the unplugged z-wave unit from the all-lights-group, the all-lights-off operation was very fast again.