All switches worked fine for 2 years on the HUSBZB. I wanted to redo my server so I figured I’d upgrade to the best-in-class Zigbee and Zwave radios. Currently for Zwave that is the Aeotec and the Zooz. Aeotec was sold out so I went with Zooz. I have a couple showstopper bugs after pairing everything back up:
Slower to respond. It takes much longer for the switches to respond to a zwave command.
Whether manually or through a zwave command, if I power the switch on to a moderate to high brightness, and then turn it off, and then cycle it back on, it will power up briefly and then immediately go to 1% brightness or off.
I’ve tried reducing the max brightness to 80% and there’s no change in both brightness and this behavior. I’ve updated the Inovelli firmware’s from 1.57 to 1.61. I’ve confirmed the zooz firmware is up to date.
I have a couple of choices:
Exchange stick with Zooz in case it’s faulty. I’ve noticed i’s very sensitive to ports and wont’ work at all with a usb extension cord.
Get a 700 series from Aeotec once available.
Revert back to 500 series, which worked fine, and use it just for zwave.
I had not realized that “upgrading” from 500 to 700 would be so painful. The issues I’m having though seem to centered on the inovelli’s. I have some zooz switches and plugs and some Honeywell and Jasco fan controllers that work fine on the 700.
What firmware version are you running on your stick? If zooz hasn’t released an update to address the below issue, I think you might be able to use generic firmware.
Did you perform a hard reset on the switches after firmware update? Some of these firmware changes added parameters that might not be initiated or have old memory from other data. It is always recommended that a hard reset be performed (20s config hold until red) after any firmware updates.
As far as the mesh not performing, I agree this is either THE 700 series bug that has plagued that series (all 700 series coordinators) for years. Make sure you have the very latest firmware that fixes the above linked bug, then make sure you perform a network heal and post the results.
Also, are you using encryption or none? A lot of us don’t care if someone can change a light state so we use unencrypted for max mesh performance.
So first thing I did was follow the instructions to update the ZS10 stick, which didn’t work because the firmware was already up to date. It’s running 7.17.2 which I believe is the latest firmware according to Zooz. I also put out a request to Zooz to get the latest firmware for my Zooz client devices, particularly 2 ZEN15 powerplugs which I’ve heard could be flooding the network with erroneous status updates.
I did have to perform a hard reset on every Zwave device in the house, including my Inovelli red’s to pair them to the new stick. The network has been up for about 3 days and I’ve noticed that, in addition to the above, devices, including Inovelli’s will report as dead every now and then. A ping from the zwavejs2mqtt dashboard will immediatley revive them. Did not have this issue with the old stick but I do recall zwave being…temperamental the first few days of establishment. I’ve run the heal process multiple times. One of them tends to report a heal failure.
Other observation is I deleted the Adaptive Lighting integration I was using in Home Assistant that can mess with light brightness. It seems to have impacted the ability of the Inovelli’s to stay lit. Not sure what about it was conflicting with the switches on the 700 stick as it worked fine before. Will re-create the integration and toggle different settings to see if I can find a pattern.
In essence, I had assumed I would get generally better performance by upgrading a very old stick to a very new stick, but so far it’s been worse in every way, presumably related to the firmware bugs people are reporting all over the place. I’d be wiling to return the Zooz and buy the more expensive Aeotec one if it would fix it, but it looks like they’re all probably impacted by this.
Think I was able to fix number 2. Deleted the Adaptive Lighting integration in my Home Assistant that was apparently hijacking the lights immediately (and incorrectly) to turn them to 1%. I did reach out to Zooz and it looks like all my firmware is up to date, so even with 7.17.2, with these clients, there is a bit of slowdown versus the 500 stick I had. Looks like it’ll either get resolved in firmware update or that’s why the 800 series is rushing into dev.
Yup that was exactly it. The sleep mode was stuck on for that Adaptive Lighting integration for some reason. It is normally automated to turn off but I may have blocked it from running. So the showstopper had nothing to do with the 700 series.
Other issue remains but is livable. Continuing to test it to see if response times improve over time.
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