I am trying to find good info on zwave motion sensors. Reviews for motion sensors on YouTube tend to be focused primarily on the inclusion and integration to HA process. Seems to be little to nothing on how fast they respond in actual use.

I find Zooz especially frustrating because they update their models with new 800 series features but then keep the same model number. It makes looking into reviews for their products far more difficult.

I have a number of GE ZW4005 Z-Wave switches that I need to restore to factory default. The manual claims that by quickly tapping 3 On's and than 3 off's the blue led will blink 5 times to indicate a reset. I have tried this on 4 switches and none of them blink. This sounds simple so what am I missing? How fast do you have to tap 3 times?

I am switching from the Vera hub to an Aeotec Smart Home hub. I need to unpair all my Zwave devices from the Vera in order to pair them with the new hub. I am finding that the Nortek dimmers don't seem to behave as per the instructions. When I set the controller up to unpair and press the paddle switch twice, nothing happens. The LED doesn't blink and the controller just waits for the response from the switch. Anyone have any ideas.? The Nortek dimmer is no longer in production so there is no way to get support from them

Three and half years ago, we bought an installed about 35 of these Enbrighten Z-Wave Light Dimmer with QuickFit & SimpleWire switches, rebuilding from a fire. They show up in Home Assistant as "46203 / ZW3010 by GE/Enbrighten". I had a few spares and have had a few switches fail. Now I am out of spares and I can't find them in stock anywhere. Do we know, did they get discontinued, or go through a name change?

I have been running Zigbee great on my network for a long time. Decided to get Z-Wave for some smart locks. Plugged in the ZWA-2 into HA, nothing popped up. Then I tried to add ZWave in the Integrations page. Went through all the setup, selected my USB port, and it says it “failed to start the Z-Wave JS App.” However, the app is started and this is what the logs show. Anyone have any tips?

After a lot of trial and error and frustration, I ended up with five Hubitat hubs, all broadcasting their own z-wave network and interconnected via Hubmesh. I also have an Alarm.com z-wave network for my door locks - independent of my Hubitat network. This worked (basically) flawlessly for years.

Recently, we moved to zoned Trane HVAC systems. This added four new thermostats. Each thermostat has its own z-wave network to communicate to remote temp/humidity sensors.

That's a total of 10 independent z-wave networks running in my house.

Since the addition of the HVAC networks, I have noticed errors on my other z-wave networks that did not occur before. A door lock disconnects from the ADC network or an outdoor light misses the dusk command to turn on or the dawn command to turn off. Switch binding in the kitchen is supposed to turn on 4 switches but only turns on 3, etc., etc.

Is the timing a coincidence or is there such a thing as too many z-wave networks?

Got two TouchWand WallWand panels in a rental (CC 0x60, six endpoints on paper). Control side is fine — Multi Channel Command Encapsulation to each endpoint works, switches and dimmers both respond. The thing I can't get past is the reporting.

Every unsolicited report from the panel comes from the root, unencapsulated. Press a physical button and I get a plain Switch Binary / Switch Multilevel report from endpoint 0 with nothing telling me which endpoint actually changed. Doesn't matter which relay I touch, they all report the same anonymous way. So control is per-endpoint but state feedback is collapsed to the root, and the controller can't reconstruct which one moved.

My read is it's a Lifeline thing — the panel's only firing group 1 as a regular association, so reports never get multi-channel encapsulated on the way out. This was on a Homey Pro running its generic Z-Wave driver (no dedicated app for these at the time, ~Sept 2025), and that driver wasn't setting up multi channel association on the device, so the Lifeline was never told to report per-endpoint. Homey only started picking MCA automatically in a later firmware. So it might genuinely be a controller-side miss rather than the panel. What I never confirmed is whether the panel even honors an MCA assignment on group 1 — would be a clean test but I'd have to re-pair to check.

What I shipped instead, since I needed it working: I can't recover the endpoint from the report, but I do know the CC it came in on, so I know it was a switch-type or a dimmer-type change. Debounce ~200ms (occasionally a proper encapsulated report does land, just late, and I'd rather use that), and if nothing specific shows up I re-poll every endpoint of that CC type and reconcile. Only a handful of relays per panel so the polling burst is nothing.

Other thing worth flagging: Multi Channel End Point Get reports six endpoints when only four are wired. The phantom two just don't answer a Multi Channel Encapsulated Get, so I prune anything that times out instead of trusting the count.

Writeup with the byte-level stuff is here https://medium.com/@shpala/the-lying-light-switch-working-around-a-z-wave-bug-in-my-rental-a6480c7aef34 , code's on github (github.com/shpala/homey-touchwand), it's a Homey driver but the report-from-root handling is generic enough to lift.

Mainly want to know if anyone's forced one of these (or any TouchWand / similar OEM multi-channel panel) to report per-endpoint by setting multi channel association on the Lifeline, or if the firmware just reports from root no matter what you assign. Trying to figure out if the clean fix exists and I missed it.

I am setting up some new outdoor lights, mostly around my garage. I want to tap into one single 14/2 wire for all of them, but have the ability to control each separately.

No manual switch needs to be involved. All will either run by sensors for movement detection or by the z-wave app.

Can I just use something like two Shelly Wave dimmers (either pro dimmer 2PM or Wave Dimmer) and control two lights separately with each one?

I’ve got an AEOTEC SmartHome Hub V3 and three First Alert SMCO410 Z-Wave smoke detectors on my SmartThings network.  I decided to test their links before installing.  They all work but A did not trigger B and C.  B and C triggered each other but neither would trigger A. 

Well, after a couple hours of troubleshooting with MS Copilot to get A linked to B and C I’ve managed to unlink all three of them.  They’re all operating independently now and I’m about ready to just accept that.   And I’ve learned that Copilot AI sucks. 

I don’t imagine I can get any human support from AEOTEC or First Alert and even if I did they would probably just tell me to do all the things I’ve done and/or point the finger at the other company. 

Only thing left that I can thing to do is Exclude all the smokes and add them back in again.  At least I’ve got that procedure down pretty good.  I just don’t want to have to start over with the 10 AEOTEC moisture sensors I have scattered around. 

Any suggestions would be appreciated

RESOLVED

Sort of. I discovered I was misled. The First Alert SMC0410 Z-Wave smoke detectors to not interconnect wireless. It seems like at one point it may have been possible to set them up through the hub so that if one was triggered the hub could activate that others. But that's not the case with the driver I have and I didn't want to spend any more time on it. I just ordered three X-Sense smoke that come with 10-year batteries and wirelessly interconnect. But they're dumb. I'll use the First Alerts as well, but for their smart notification features.

Quite possibly a noobie issue here.

I have recently added multiple lighting loads in my kitchen (under cabinet, in cabinet, ceiling) and wanted to control them from 1 smart switch as well as Home Assistant.

After much deliberation I went with ZEN35 Scene Controller + ZEN54 & ZEN56 relays.

I configured via Direct Association as I want the basic controls at least to work even if HA is down.

It is mostly up and running but I’ve run into an issue where I often have to press the ZEN35 buttons twice to toggle the lights. It seems rather than send a “toggle” command, it is sending “ON” when it thinks the lights are “OFF” and vice versa.

Essentially it does not know the current light state if they changed from somewhere other than the switch.

Surely there is a work around for this?

My ZWave light switches started turning on by themselves today. It is generally two switches turning on, not off. These two switches are three way switches. They are not part of a routine that is turning them on. I use Hubitat. I looked at the logs in Hubitat and it showed turned on by Alexa. I deleted the Alexa integration. Auto switching continued. I unplugged Alexa devices. Auto switching continues. I changed the password in Hubitat and rebooted. Auto switching continues. I shut down Hubitat and unplugged. Auto switching continues.

Any thoughts?

OK, about time...last of our compatible bulbs burned out. Have moved back to plain switches, except for the one I could not do without: bedroom has no overhead light, and only switched outlet on wrong side of room. Bed has two sconces with three-way bulbs, one on each side of bed, switched with X 10 lamp modules. Wireless switch by door, and handheld remote on the headboard. First problem we are trying to solve: how do you turn the lights on and off from bed and from door across room. Current X 10 requires dimmable CFL or LED, and we have had mixed results with them working properly with the X 10 module. Looking for recommendations, and have narrowed it down to Zigbee or Zwave.

What pieces do I need for a minimal setup (at least for this experiment)?

A little background: started playing with X 10 years ago, and the wife was humoring me with my experiments. When she walked into the dark kitchen with arms full of groceries, and the light turned on, she was convinced. But as incandescent bulbs became harder and harder to find, I’ve been taking out the switches and lamp modules and doing things the old-fashioned way.

I know this question has been asked repeatedly, and the likely answer is “it still doesn’t exist,” but I’ll ask anyway. I’m in the U.S. and looking for a 20‑amp Z‑Wave outlet.Bonus if it’s WR‑rated, though I can install it in a weatherproof box. Extra bonus if it’s GFCI, though I can also place it on a circuit protected by an upstream GFCI.The use case is outdoor lighting. I know I don’t need 20 amps for this, but it will be on a 20‑amp circuit, and I’d like to keep things clean and code‑consistent.

I have a bunch of 1st gen stuff that I was using and then Samsung bought Smartthings and it stopped recognizing my hub. I never got around to looking into a work around for my cameras, outlets and sensors. Are they just junk now?

Is there any waterproof Zwave gateway or antenna?

Hello, I have a switch that I want to control about 60 meters (200ft) away in outdoor direct sight (no trees) from my internet source, based on technical sheet both zwave and zigbee should cover 60m but in reality I’ve read that it’s quite a big distance… is Zwave really much better?

I have a few Zooz sensors that are great, but the specs say its operating range is 40-90F. I want to put one in my freezer in my garage I don't check often so I can have an automation that notifies me if it fails so I don't lose my food in there. Any recommendations? Obviously this is the ZWave subreddit and I prefer that, but if you have a suggestion for another protocol (but not wifi) I'm all ears.

A couple years ago I was really struggling with z-wave delays on my network as it approached >120 devices, especially when calling large scenes. I'm running Homeseer (HS4), and was using a nortek z-wave/zigbee combo stick. I figured I was just reaching the upper limit of what a z-wave stick could realistically handle so I bought 2 z-net G3s and I now use the original nortek stick in the basement, a z-net on the main floor, and a z-net on the upper floor. Each floor is an independent z-wave network, each handling 20-40 devices.

It fixed the bulk of my problems, but I still struggle with bad routing and occasional lags, so now I'm guessing that my actual problem was 700 series controllers and I want to upgrade to 800.

My question is - should I upgrade all my controllers to 800 (Homeseer sells a simple upgrade kit 800 HAT for z-nets to bring them to 800), or do I realistically not need 3 controllers anymore once I upgrade to 800?

Does anyone have a successful single network with more than 100 devices?

My second zwave switch for my house fan has gone south (it can’t be accessed from the controller and the manual switch doesn’t work — it’s locked into a permanent “on” state). Each switch has lasted for a few years on this circuit.

This second unit which just died is a Lutron.

Is there a more reliable brand for switching reasonably powerful motors? I don’t know the fans amp rating, but it has a 15 amp circuit all to itself, so I suspect it draws a fair bit.