Can't get Zwave device to pair

I bought my Veraplus last week. Until now I only had a Xiaomi aqara with some of their sensors (they use Zigbee). Since I didn’t want to start a collection of smart home gateway hubs, I chose the Vera plus as I thought it was the most universally compatible, and because I also bought my first Zwave device: The Eurotronic Spirit Zwave plus TRV.

However I can’t get it to pair after trying on and off for the past week now. I follow the pairing instructions for the Spirit, in the meantime adding a new device through the ‘Generic Zwave device’ in the Vera UI, but the pairing just won’t work. I’ve tried factory resetting the TRV, resetting the ZWave network on the vera plus, but nothing helps…
Since I don’t have another Zwave device, I also don’t know whether the vera plus or the Spirit TRV is the cause of the problem.

Any help would be very much appreciated

I think we’ve all been in that boat before. How far apart are your device and your Vera when you attempt to pair? The closer the better!

Also, please tell us what sort of error message(s) you’re getting from Vera.

The Veraplus and TRV have been as close as physically possible, I put the TRV on top of the Veraplus in a couple of pairing attempts, in other instances I tried 50cm and 1m betwee the two, but it didn’t make any difference.

I’m also not getting any error messages as such from the Veraplus, it just counts down the 60s pairing timer, it just keeps displaying the generic pairing instructions (“Follow the inclusion process as described in the users manual”), together with a retry button

You’ve described pretty much every pairing attempt that my Vera Plus has done in the past, though I learned that the countdown going to 0 doesn’t always indicate failure.
Most of the time, I have to try 3-4 times (with and without Retry), but it sounds like you’ve made every possible move. I’m sure others will come in with suggestions? Or turn to Support by click “Need Help?” at the very top of this thread.

So the Vera is displaying the “Add new devices” message but never finds anything? Is that correct?

In that case I can only see a few possibilities:

The device: Are you sure you factory reset it? Have you tried excluding first?
The vera: If the vera started the countdown, I would think that the serial zwave address is correct but check it just in case under the zwave menu. It should be /dev/ttyS0.
zwave channel: Are the two devices working in the same region and frequency? Make sure that you don’t have a euro frequency device trying to pair with a US frequency vera for example.
Last resort: one of the two devices has failed. You will need to partition using another device to figure out which one.

Or the pairing instructions supplied by the device manufacturer are wrong. I’ve seen that more than once.

Thanks for the replies everyone, great community here it seems!

So I verified the regions, the Vera plus says Locale: EU in the ZWave settings, and on the box of the TRV it says it operates at 868.42MHz, which should be correct for EU as well.

I tried excluding the TRV, however the instructions for this don’t seem to be working, probably because it’s not yet included? The device will only go to inclusion mode when I press the button. It does display some messages (‘Rst’, followed by ‘Def’) when factory resetting it, so I guess it’s performing the reset accordingly.

Pairing instructions look fine to me, as the device also starts counting down from 120 to 0, and shows a blinking transmitter icon while doing so.

Here’s a screenshot of the Zwave settings, perhaps someone spots something which I’m missing. At least the serial address seems to be OK.

I’ll also contact Vera support. I did send an email to the TRV support but no reply so far…

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Just on the off chance, have you tried a fresh battery?

sometimes low batteries can cause issues.