Basic Z-Wave questions

For many of my z-wave devices, especially (but not exclusively) those furthest away from Homey Z-Wave connection seems to be very poor. I get either “Network request failed”, “Transmit_No_Ack”, “…timeout”, etc.

More or less everything I read here, explains that as a mesh technology, z-wave connectivity problems are solved by ensuring there are mains-powered z-waves devices near the ones suffering poor connectivity because they automatically act as repeaters.

So how far is near enough? In most cases the devices regularly failing for me are within 1-2.5 metres of the next nearest device. we have 80+ z-wave devices of which ~50 are mains powered (mostly fibaro relays/dimmers and aeotec multisensors). Surely this should be adequate?

I’ve re-added the devices from scratch 4 times, (2 days effort each time. the 4th time, in developer.athom . com I clicked ‘Reset Z-Wave network’, mistakenly thinking it would work like Fibaro home center, where it rebuilds the mesh, rather than uninstalling all the devices!)

I also moved the homey all over the house in different locations, but it doesn’t make any difference.

Somewhat unhelpfully some devices in showing connection errors in the browser-based homey UI and app are reachable in the ‘Test’ part of developer.athom . com.

Am I missing something basic here? Can anay body with experience of overcoming these things provide some guidance

I have the same but for now only with Aeotec switches … lots of power mesh around also :frowning:

Working for a week … then suddenly the message. Removing them from power solves ( for another week )

Which Homey model. Please.



Is it related to this?

2019 Pro (but the same pattern of behaviour since previous model to be honest)

Have you used the developer tools to have a look at your ZWave network?

Yes, I see between 2-4 hops from Homey to each device/node, and every so often ‘unknown nodes’ but not sure what else can derived from that list for the lay user

Have a look at my post here. Get rid of the unknown nodes and test and heal nodes not working.

Yes, thanks, I do exactly that when it comes up, but as the next post in that thread, it often doesn’t actually mean they’re unreachable. It seems to be another z-wave unreliability

Does anyone else regularly get this message when backups fail:

“Unfortunately, something went wrong while creating a Z-Wave backup: error_reading_nvm”

nvm = non volatile memory?

When it’s about a Pro 201x
Temporary remove a few (preferrably memory hungry) apps you can miss for a while
or
Try to remove all additional voices (that was a solution with not enough available diskspace on a system partition, but worth a try!).

Speech shouldn’t exceed 160 to 170MB

Screenshot from 2023-06-22 20-29-09

Thanks for explaining. I don’t think I’m hitting any memory limit though. These are what it shows:


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But disk usage for ‘Speech’ is 468MB.

Just remove all voices except the current one (Settings > Speech).
(Homey downloads voices when you switch languages, but it never removes them when you switch back to the original language.
Somehow, then the backup tool probably can’t create it’s temp file any longer).

Anyways, just give it a go, I’m pretty sure it solves your backup issue.