My Red Dimmer Switch is going into a Dead status when LED color is changed

Digital Lounge General Discussion
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I have my Red Series Dimmer connected to Home Assistant via Z-Wave JS and zwavejs2mqtt. I spent all day yesterday configuring it and have all the button related functions working great. Today I started trying to control the LED bar using config change calls, however my first test didn’t work and reported back an error saying the node was “Dead”. Sure enough, I want into the ZWaveJS2MQTT dashboard and the node was showing a Dead status.

When I use the switch, it functions as I would expect, the events are sent to HA, my automations fire, and the node goes back to showing as “Alive”.

But once I start sending param control events back to the switch to change LED color, the first call may work, but usually the second one does not, and the node goes back to Dead status. For these tests I’m just using the ZWaveJS2MQTT to make the control changes and simply changing the value using the provided dropdown. Nothing fancy, but I can report that the same behavior also appear to occur when trying to make control changes via a HA service.

Why does my switch keep dying?

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How robust is your network? I ran into this until I had about 4 nodes on the network. Basically zwave is looking for a response saying “got your message and did the change” back. If it doesn’t, it marks it as dead.

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SO my network has 7 nodes. The hub is a Aeotec Gen7 Stick plugged into my RasPi that is running HA. All of my z-wave devices are inside the same room as the RasPi, and the room in about 250sqft. Now the RasPi and my switch are on opposite sides of the room, but that’s only 20ft away.

I can confirm that is what’s marking it dead, as I can see these errors in the logs:

ERROR ZWAVE-SERVER: Z-Wave error Failed to send the command after 3 attempts (Status NoAck)
ZWaveError: Failed to send the command after 3 attempts (Status NoAck)

ERROR ZWAVE-SERVER: Z-Wave error The message cannot be sent because node 7 is dead
ZWaveError: The message cannot be sent because node 7 is dead

Is it really normal for my hub to not be able to effectively communicate with a node 20 ft away?

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Not at all.

Have you re-interviewed the nodes? Some of the 700 series sticks are having funky issues with HA. There is a z-wave discord as well you can ask, I don’t have this issue but I am on a 500-series stick.

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@kreene1987 On second look, it appears I am on a Get 5, specifically the : Z‐Stick Gen5

I have tried running a heal on the whole network, that didn’t help the issue. I’ll try a re-interview.

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It would appear that performing a re-interview on the whole network has helped and I havn’t seen the switch go dead since I performed the re-interview about 2 hours ago.

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