So, I have a bunch of devices connected to my homey pro, but the majority of my light sources are Hue (through the hue bridge) and Fibaro dimmer 2. When controlling one single device it usually reacts quite fast, but once I try to turn on/off 2-3 or more fibaro dimmers in a flow it’s total bingo: sometimes it’s ok, but very often the fibaro dimmers either take a long time (could be 10 sec) to respond, and sometimes they don’t respond at all. All my Hue lights are however really quick and stable.
You may think that I am having issues because some of the nodes are a long way from the rest of the network, but that is not the case. I have tried moving the Homey around the house, and now it’s about 1 meter from the most problematic dimmers.
So how do I debug this? Are there good ways to see if I have a problematic/faulty z-wave device in my network that could be messing it up for the entire network? Should I try to buy a different brand than fibaro, and see if that makes a difference? Maybe zigbee dimmers? I have 3 fibaro dimmers in the same wall box. Could they be creating interference for each other?
Thankful for all hints, because this is really annoying.
Knut, have you upgraded the z-wave antenna mod as well documented the forum ?
I had very similar problems and carried out the upgrade, significant improvement in range, comunication and stability.
It is well worth the effort and an hour of your life!
Andrew.
First suggestion: Switch the lamps on or off with a delay of 1 second.
Second suggestion: Include the modules in un-secure mode, as Martijn_C has already suggested. I haven’t tried it myself yet, but I have read several times that this will bring a significant optimization. Of course the modules have to be re-included for this, so it’s a lot of work. To include the modules you can select the Fibaro Walli Switch, then the modules will be included in un-secure mode, of course as the original module (e.g. Dimmer 2).
The Z-Wave Mesh is “self-healing”, but it takes a certain amount of time until the routes are optimized.
In my opinion, it cannot be ruled out that a defective module may interfere with the Z-Wave mesh. I don’t know if you can detect something like that with a Z-Wave Sniffer.
You can see in Developer whether a module generally has connection problems, e.g. if the “Route” column contains an “Unknown” and the module is possibly routed via a non-existent ID.
I’d not recommend it for now. Zigbee devices also require a well-functioning mesh, and because you have Philips Hue devices running via the bridge, they are not used as repeaters. It is a separate Zigbee mesh.
Not really, switchboards are equipped with 10, 20 and more modules and these do not interfere with each other.
Would not recommand this, as they are radio modules, some distance is prefered, have read on this forum someone had problems with two wallplugs close to eachother. At least you can try to disconnect temporarely to see if it makes different.
Yes!! I love you guys! Non-secure by removing all devices and adding them as Walli Dimmer seems to have solved the issue! Now they act almost instantly, and I can just hope that the stability will be much better! Thanks a bunch, this has been a huge PITA with my smart house setu!
On a related note: I find it very strange that companies like Athom/Fibaro that try to make user-friendly smart house solutions do not offer a better user experience for things like this, given that it seems to be a big problem for many. It’s one of those things that could completely put you off the smart house project, and I assume the number of people just living with this crappy UX of slow and unreliable lights are much higher than what is surfaced in this forum. Ideally the smart hub should be able to detect these kind of issues by itself and suggest different improvements. I think this is where they need to go if they want to take the market of the non-tech savvy majority, at least. Well, I’m at least super happy that I could solve mye issues with just config!
In my case, Antenna mod did a significant improvement in direct connections of devices to Homey. However, some delays occurred when I was controlling group of zwave devices. Hint with unsecured inclusion of devices helped to solve this issue! In case of Fibaro devices, you need to add them as a Walli switch. Once all devices included in unsecure mode, everything is running well.
This is the reason, why people should use services of professionals, when deciding to go for home automation in bigger scale. Time and troubles linked with correct setup are more expensive then those services.
This also worked for me. After months with unreliable lights. Now it’s fast and more reliable. I’ve been in contact with Homey about this and their setting up a test environment to test large scale deployments of devices like this. Hopefully that will contribute to a more stable release in the future.
