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Comment by jaywalk | Hacker News Reader

I don't know what your Z-wave setup looks like, but all I've got are GE smart switches and GE smart outlets, controlled with Home Assistant using an Aeotec Z-stick. It works flawlessly with zero noticeable delay, 100% of the time.

It sounds like you've either got some bad interference or bad devices.

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So much of one's experience depends on the z-wave hardware and it's not obvious at all which brands or products will be more reliable or better than others. My network is a hodge-podge of different switches and outlets, but mesh networking means it's easy to poison the network with a bad implementation. And then good luck finding the offending hardware.

Up until this past year, every single ZWave radio was made by the same company. They are now allegedly certifying third parties but I haven’t yet seen anyone announce that they’ve achieved that certification. It’s possible to build a crappy ZWave device, but the radio and network side should be solid, even on crappy devices.

I've had a lot of issues with battery powered z-wave devices not waking up.

Also, IIRC there is a bug in the zwave-js github issue tracker about the 700 series Z-sticks dropping commands. Sometimes I need to reboot for outgoing packets to reach devices from the Z-stick.

I have this bug too. It happened with the old zwave plugin as well, my Aeotec stick just stops delivering packets if it gets bumped and I have to restart the whole system.

One of the recommendations I read on some github issues was to put the z-stick on a USB extension cable to rule out interference from other ports. I was skeptical of this but it did seem to improve my experience.

I still get the issue that makes it need to reboot every now and then however. Edit: https://github.com/zwave-js/node-zwave-js/issues/3906 -- apparently there is a firmware fix for this now? Will try out later.

Same setup here. Love using z-wave as a standard and then bridging everything over to Homekit for siri / phone control center access

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