Switch completely frozen

Hey, @KuLe. Did you ever get an answer on this? I’m having a similar problem but with an ST v3 hub. Hoping someone has / can provide the answer.

I too am having these problems and have found that pulling the air gap fixes the problem every time. I have 30+ of the red series on/off switches and it only seems to happen to some of them. I have many that have never had this issue ever. I’m sure they are working to determine the problem, but it’s going to be hard because as far as I can tell nobody has been able to actually isolate a specific thing that is causing this to happen. If they are unable to create the problem on a testbench it is going to be extremely difficult to fix fast. I read that some people are experiencing it almost daily. I had it happen fairly often (once a week) at first. Now it really rarely ever happens. I did run the zwave utility in smartthings when I was having this issue. I have no idea if that actually did anything, but it gave me the impression of helping lol. One big thing I have noticed is that the issue tends to happen with my switches that are on the edges of my house. I’m wondering if it has to do with # of hop points along the mesh network. Something like the switch is trying to communicate but not receiving responses, which eventually causes it to lock-up. 100% conjecture just thinking.

@Eric_Inovelli
Would it be helpful to make a doc where information can be compiled about this issue. Something where if people are comfortable doing so can mark down instances of the issue with information like switch series/device handler version/time of last 3 commands/what those commands were/etc. Obviously if people aren’t comfortable sharing the information they don’t need to, but maybe it would help.

Yeah – this would be helpful for sure. Let me set something up that maybe we can collaborate directly with the manufacturer to streamline this. We’ve been running stress tests on switches sent back to us as well as the manufacturer and we can’t seem to replicate this issue.

If anyone is open to it, we can send what’s called a Zniffer that will monitor your Z-Wave network (commands sent to/from the hub) and we can try to capture any data to see if it’s a Z-Wave thing.

We were able to replicate this on our Fan/Light switch and it was determined to be the SDK – when we switched to a different SDK, the freezing went away. The difference with the fan/light switch is that it’s 700 Series (whereas the On/Off & Dimmers are 500 Series) so the SDK fix will not apply.

I’m going to update this thread shortly to seek any volunteers as well as setup a possibly a Microsoft Teams thread where we can all chat directly to try to figure this out.

I have about 5 LZW31-SN dimmers, and this has happened once so far. On the one that froze, it controls ~5 LEDs.

It had been working the previous day, turned the lights off at night, and in the morning it did not come on. I had to airgap it.

I don’t remember if the LEDs were dimmed at night, when power use can drop tp about 10W.

According to Vera the version is
3,6,4,1,43

Adding my LZW30, purchased in January, to the list of frozen switches. Mine is connected with Smartthings V2 hub. Use automation with humidity sensor to turn on bathroom fan. Has been working flawlessly manually (with 45 min turn-off timer set for the device in smartthings) and automatically with the humidity sensor. Last week, froze up in “on” mode, and only reset via cutting power. When frozen, no communications with smartthings, buttons didn’t work.

Thanks for the posters who mentioned the air gap switch. Glad Inovelli added it–easier than the breaker method I used!

Are we expecting any fix? For me, my Red series switches in the house work fine. Only this one, once, so far.

My LZW30-SN (purchased thru Amazon in Jan) has locked up and been unresponsive occasionally and an air gap fixes it. My issue now is the LED is frozen. No matter what I do I can only get an LED upon initial setting, air gap and reset, after that the LED freezes and doesn’t respond. See post below for info
LZW30 -SN No LED Control

Complete newbie but I have a locally unresponsive dimmer with smart things hub. I’ve read the thread and it seems like this is a communication security issue - since I get the following diagnostic in IDE:

  • networkSecurityLevel: ZWAVE_S2_FAILED

So dear wise ones … is there a workaround? I’ve disabled security in my smart things app but no dice. Do I have to remove the switch then re-add with security disabled? Or what? Any suggestions appreciated.

Hmmm. There is trickery afoot. After I posted, and after more alcohol, I explicitly set some parameters rather than relying on defaults (for example setting disable local and disable remote to zero, and installing the device handler from GitHub rather than using the default.

This enabled the switch but disabled control via Z-Wave grrr. Went to bed, got up, and all is working perfectly. WTF? Let’s see what happens next.

That usually means that the switch did not get added to ST completely properly. Did you add it by scanning the barcode?

I’d exclude/factory reset the switch and add it again. It should say ZWAVE_S2_AUTHENTICATED.

I came here from a Google search. I am experience the lock up issues with several Zooz switches. I know this isn’t a Zooz forum but I’m guessing the issue could be similar. The air gap is nice for the dimmer switches but for non-dimmer switches, I have to make a trip to the breaker box.

For me, I upgrade all of the firmware and re-added my switches with S2 security enables. Zooz support thinks the S2 security may be the problem. I’ve tried excluding/including the switches as Zooz support suggested, but my switch keeps getting added with S2 security enabled.

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Did anyone ever get an answer to this? I’m experiencing similar behavior with Zooz switches and their support hasn’t been helpful at all. I have 33 Zooz switches and I’m nearing the point of pulling them all.

I have a NZW31-S too which is responding correctly to hub (vera) instructions but the physical toggle switches are not working. The air gap is the only physical option or turning on and off the lights. Read through the posts here but found no real solution of how to fix this. Already tried the air gap pull and push a few times to see if it would fix the issue. Also tried the up paddle 10x to see if that would reset. No luck and the blue indicator is also not showing on/off.

I was having the same lockup issue that only the air gap would fix shortly after installing a Red Series LZW30-SN. It would happen about every month. Updating the firmware to latest version this past spring eliminated the issue for me.