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So much happier after moving off 994i - moving was worth it!


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Posted

I moved to IoP (IoX 5.6.0 on Polisy) over a month ago and it's fixed a whole bunch of problems I was having. Also allowed me to dust off automation ideas I had put on the back burner because:

- I had reached the 1000 program limit (about a year ago) - now at 2000, I think. I was at 980 programs and if I wanted to add anything meaningful I needed to give something up
- Simple automations were slow, even insteon triggered ones like motion turning on a light, which used to work flawlessly before I added a bunch of zwave devices. Everything is back to flawless... well 99% flawless... there are always the odd glitches with Insteon.
- Nodeservers (5 of them) were retrying constantly and sometimes failing to communicate. That's no longer a problem.
- Startups would exceed event queue capacity and there was no way to figure out what events were missed. To mitigate this I had developed a complex startup routine that only enabled programs and did device queries in chunks with regular delays in between. I must have spend 100's of hours building and refining that and, while it was better, it was far from perfect. 
- Admin Console loading and backups were exxxxtra suuuper sloooow. These are not quick things by any means, but, relatively speaking, they are notably better now. 

The migration wasn't flawless by any means but it was far less painful than I expected. The biggest issue was that about half a dozen zwave devices (out of an estimated 70) remained as "Placeholders" after migration. An "Update with Interview" would fix them temporarily but at next reboot they would come back as placeholders. A couple magically fixed themselves (some kind of sun and moon alignment thing is all I can think of) but many needed to be excluded/re-included, which messes up all the programs those devices are in. Support tickets about those placeholders remain unanswered to this day. There are also zwave devices for which I reported issues that weren't there with 994i and did not hear anything back so not hopeful they will be fixed. That said, overall zwave stuff is working light years better than it was.

Moving of 994i was definitely worth it.

 

Posted

I agree, it not good to have ZWave devices mess up programs each time you exclude/re-include. But I guess at the time Z-Wave was added years ago, it was only way due to limitations of ISY and nodes for everything, probably lack of resources so they just used the ZWave node ID to keep track for programs and scenes. If they did it now, I bet they would make it a nodeserver, where you add the devices there and map them to a node/name yourself which gets sent to IoX. If you exclude/include you just make sure it is using the same node slot name.

That is a lot of programs!

 

 

Posted
13 hours ago, brians said:

I guess at the time Z-Wave was added years ago, it was only way due to limitations of ISY and nodes for everything, probably lack of resources so they just used the ZWave node ID to keep track for programs and scenes. If they did it now, I bet they would make it a nodeserver...

Is the messing up of programs following an exclude/include only an issue with ISY? I thought it was a general zwave issue affecting all HA controllers.

Posted (edited)
10 hours ago, johnnyt said:

Is the messing up of programs following an exclude/include only an issue with ISY? I thought it was a general zwave issue affecting all HA controllers.

Home Assistant doesn’t have the issue. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited by brians
Posted
12 hours ago, johnnyt said:

Is the messing up of programs following an exclude/include only an issue with ISY? I thought it was a general zwave issue affecting all HA controllers.

The only time you might have a program issue is if the ZWave address changes.

Posted
10 hours ago, DennisC said:

The only time you might have a program issue is if the ZWave address changes.

anytime I've excluded/re-included a device it's gotten a new zwave address. that's the issue. too bad there isn't a way to manually (re)assign an address to a zwave device and end up with all the program and other relationships intact. 

Posted
1 hour ago, johnnyt said:

anytime I've excluded/re-included a device it's gotten a new zwave address. that's the issue. too bad there isn't a way to manually (re)assign an address to a zwave device and end up with all the program and other relationships intact. 

While that is true, I think you might be missing the underlining concern, you shouldn't have to repeatedly exclude/include a Zwave device with an Universal Devices infrastructure.

Exclude/Include is the recommended method for 1st time installation of a ZWave device. Once included, I have never had to repeat the procedure for a ZWave device.

If you find the need to repeatedly exclude/include a device, there is something else going on and should be investigate to determine how and why this is required.

  • Like 2
Posted (edited)
On 6/11/2023 at 7:32 AM, DennisC said:

While that is true, I think you might be missing the underlining concern, you shouldn't have to repeatedly exclude/include a Zwave device with an Universal Devices infrastructure.

Exclude/Include is the recommended method for 1st time installation of a ZWave device. Once included, I have never had to repeat the procedure for a ZWave device.

If you find the need to repeatedly exclude/include a device, there is something else going on and should be investigate to determine how and why this is required.

Reasons I had to exclude/include with IoX. 
 

- their zwave implementation is currently beta and often may have issues but I believe is better now.

 
- no OTA - must exclude and do firmware upgrade elsewhere then include

- in case or Zen17 you must exclude and include after setting certain parameters to enable feature - reinterview did not work. 

Since the the name in IoX based on the ZWave node ID, unfortunately have to edit programs and scenes whenever exclude include. 

Edited by brians
  • 2 weeks later...
Posted
On 6/11/2023 at 10:32 AM, DennisC said:

While that is true, I think you might be missing the underlining concern, you shouldn't have to repeatedly exclude/include a Zwave device with an Universal Devices infrastructure.

I don't want to overstate the problem but I also don't think it should be dismissed or minimized. For sure when everything is fine... well... everything is fine. What distinguishes a good product/solution/vendor from a bad one is how it deals with problems - and the need for upgrades when it comes to this kind of thing. Things should be as easy as possible to configure, fix, upgrade, and replace. Although they aren't "easy" by any means right now (i.e. don't try this if you don't have patience and determination), anything that moves things closer towards 'easy' and away from "holy-sh*t-what-a-hassle!" is valuable.

 

  • 3 weeks later...
Posted

Hi Johhny - @johnnyt

  The Z-Wave issues you still experience - do any of them relate to specific Z-Wave products? If so, can you list them?

  And what Z-Wave issues do you have now that you didn't have with the ISY994?

Thanks!

Shawn

Posted

IoX refuses to recognize Celsius temperature reports for my three Aeotec Multisensors and the two Aeotec aerQ sensors I tried. Read somewhere that this is a known issue on the UDI 'to do' list but this is second hand info. 

I suspect issues I had with aerQ and a Zooz ZSE44 - excessive battery-killing reporting - to be unique to Zmatter board (based on feedback from Aeotec and Zooz support) but did not open a support ticket to get UDI confirmation or troubleshooting advice. I simply returned the aerQ sensors while I still could and gave up on using the ZSE44. I will say that I do have another ZSE44 that works ok so, for that sensor, I suspect the sensor itself is the problem or part of it. (Yes, I upgraded to latest firmware and did factory reset, etc. etc.)

I don't know if all the migration issues I reported (summarized briefly in my original post) were fixed and won't be able to tell as I only had one 994i and it's now fully migrated to IoP.

The only net new Zwave devices I added after moving to IoP are the aerQ sensors I tried and returned, and a ZEN32 Scene Controller. The latter communicates fine but is clunky to work with (see this post and this post). It certainly isn't the replacement for a KeypadLinc that I had hoped it would be, although that appears to be related to IoX support for it based on what Home Assistant can do with it so maybe it will one day be better than a KeypadLinc thanks to its multi tap capability.

 

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