Hello there,
this is the first time now that I want to exclude a Z-Wave device from my controller after upgrading to openHAB 5.x. I am on openHAB 5.1 currently and we are talking about the old Z-Wave binding. There is just no Z-Wave specific buttons available in the thing page of my controller:
Any ideas what to do? Can I remove and recreate the thing without loosing any configuration?
Are you on 5.1 or 5.1.1? 5.1.1 included a fix for some missing Zwave actions - maybe that would solve your issue? If you are already on 5.1.1, ignore this…
I am on 5.1.0. It is working after the update. Thank you for the hint.
Well, the buttons are back but they are not working anymore as expected. When I press the “Exclude Devices” button, the controller and all zwave items go offline and back online after a second. It is not possible to exclude a device.
Here an excerpt from the log:
2026-01-14 22:14:40.566 [INFO ] [ab.event.ThingStatusInfoChangedEvent] - Thing 'zwave:device:36fdee66d8:node22' changed from ONLINE to OFFLINE (BRIDGE_OFFLINE): Controller is offline
2026-01-14 22:14:40.567 [INFO ] [ab.event.ThingStatusInfoChangedEvent] - Thing 'zwave:serial_zstick:36fdee66d8' changed from ONLINE to OFFLINE (BRIDGE_OFFLINE): Controller is offline
2026-01-14 22:14:45.572 [INFO ] [ve.internal.protocol.ZWaveController] - Starting ZWave controller
2026-01-14 22:14:45.573 [INFO ] [ve.internal.protocol.ZWaveController] - ZWave timeout is set to 5000ms. Soft reset is false.
2026-01-14 22:14:49.606 [INFO ] [ab.event.ThingStatusInfoChangedEvent] - Thing 'zwave:serial_zstick:36fdee66d8' changed from OFFLINE (BRIDGE_OFFLINE): Controller is offline to ONLINE
2026-01-14 22:14:49.607 [INFO ] [ab.event.ThingStatusInfoChangedEvent] - Thing 'zwave:device:36fdee66d8:node114' changed from OFFLINE (BRIDGE_OFFLINE): Controller is offline to ONLINE
This behaviour is new to me or is it new and intended?
Could someone test if it is only me or an openHAB issue?
What is the correct way to address this? Create an issue at the Github binding? Never done that before.
Maybe @apella12 would have some ideas?
Are you sure that the exclusion mode was not entered even though it listed the lines in your log? It’s possible this happened, but exclusion was eventually enabled. I believe that with Zwave some interesting logs are also entered in the events.log as well as the openhab.log that you posted. You should check there too. And if you are not seeing anything, you can turn on debug logging for the Zwave binding.
If this doesn’t work, you can use the Simplicity tools to exclude the node outside of OH.
My test showed the same issue. This was fixed by @florian-h05 in October 2024, but may have reappeared with the changes to the webui actions? Thing details: Fix config action saves the whole Thing by florian-h05 · Pull Request #2775 · openhab/openhab-webui.
Edit: Sorry for the ping, but I think that was the quickest for OP
The root issue is that Z-Wave action buttons are implemented through a very ugly „hack“, which wasn’t working back then in the UI and it can absolutely be that it broke again. I’ve created an issue and pinged the binding maintainers over a year ago asking them to migrate to Thing actions so we can get rid of that hack, see Replace config actions with Thing actions · Issue #17992 · openhab/openhab-addons · GitHub .
Anyway, seems we have to look at the Main UI code and fix it, the regression might not only affect the Z-Wave actions …
To answer the question: I am not 100% sure.
The device I am trying to exclude behaves a bit strange and is not 100% working anymore, so it could also be the device. I never had this issue with the controller going offline before so I have no experience if this ever worked.
I will reset the device and remove the ghost with Simplicity to solve my problem.
I have done some testing myself (though I don’t have Z-Wave devices) and Main UI is correctly saving only the configuration when changing the Thing configuration and clicking save. So the issue that was fixed in Thing details: Fix config action saves the whole Thing by florian-h05 · Pull Request #2775 · openhab/openhab-webui · GitHub hasn’t reappeared.
Can you please check if there is a toast notification and what it displayes when executing an exclude action?
There is a popup:
If I press OK nothing happens in the UI and the first message in the log is:
2026-01-26 19:16:40.595 [INFO ] [ab.event.ThingStatusInfoChangedEvent] - Thing 'zwave:serial_zstick:36fdee66d8' changed from ONLINE to OFFLINE (COMMUNICATION_ERROR): Controller is offline
Do you want me to test with ZWave debug level?
What is currently happening when you try any of the Zwave action items is that the controller is reset and nothing else will happen. If you look at the code tab, you will see exclude = true, but that is not how it is supposed to work. @florian-h05 has a fix, but it is not merged. I would try Simplicity Studio.
I am fine with using Simplicity Studio. I have reset my ZWave device and can reinclude it.
I thought that I should test it for further investigation but if you already know and have fix then we can close this topic.