Are ”delay” needed when switching on/off multiple Lights in a Flow?

[Borgen]

I am back at using Homey in my home after using a Fibaro HC3 for some years. “Back in the days” when I was using a Homey (in 2019) you had to put in a “delay” between every light you wanted to turn on (like a 2-3 sec delay between every action) in a Flow.

At the beginning of my new “Era” with Homey I thought it was “fixed”now because I had several flows that did turn on/off 3-5 different light without delay in the flow and it worked just fine.

But then all of a sudden I started to having problems, Flows executed but nothing happened and when trying to manually turn on a light I got an red error message in the Homey app saying something about “Too much z-wave traffic”.

[Peter_Kawa]

There seems to be a general issue for several users here:

Homey pro 2023 - zwave too much traffic error?

I had a perfectly working homey pro 2023 with about 45 zwave devices. Since today, the zwave is not really working anymore as I get an error: "Could not send command. Too much Z-wave traffic. (TRANSMIT_COMPLETE_FAIL). This goes for all zwave devices now, and might be related to the latest firmware update. I have tried to reboot, reset (with back) but nothing helps. My old homey pro works perfectly, so its not the devices themselves. anyone else experienced the same?

[Borgen]

Yes, I have seen that… not looking good and hope they solve it…

But regardless of that issue, when Homey are working as it should….

In a normal Flow for z-wave lights that turns on 5-6 lights, is it needed to put in a delay between every “turn on” action?

[Peter_Kawa]

@Borgen

In a normal Flow for z-wave lights that turns on 5-6 lights, is it needed to put in a delay between every “turn on” action?

I hope they fixed that issue once and for all, but I really don’t know.

1. Instead you can create and use a group device for switching multiple lights.
   You can use Device Capabilities or < group > app for this. They switch the lights in a group device in sequence automatically, which means ‘not all at once’.

2. In advanced flow, you can ‘daisy-chain’ the lights, then they’re switched on/off in sequence. This is almost not much more work, than adding them in parallels
   

[Borgen]

@Peter_Kawa Good tip!

I really like the Daisy Chain advanced flow method, smart also to add the method if one “fails”it continues to the next!

So in this Daisy Chain method you don’t need to put in a “delay”after each is turned on I assume?

[Peter_Kawa]

Thanks! Yea the error ‘nipple’ is ideal in these situations, this way it skips any erroring card.

@Borgen

So in this Daisy Chain method you don’t need to put in a “delay”after each is turned on I assume?

In theory you shouldn’t, while they’re not fired all at once. Of course you can add a 1s delay after each 4 or 5 lights, but I’d try first without!

[Borgen]

@Peter_Kawa

In theory you shouldn’t, while they’re not fired all at once.

@Peter_Kawa Works like a charm, now have a flow that turns on/off 15-20 different lights and have now tested it several times in a row without a single issue. Thanks for the help!