New Year's Eve Party - Vera handled it without a stumble

I have a pretty heavily automated home - all lights, HVAC, bathroom fans, door locks, and more. It has probably been several years since I have had a large number of people in my house, and it was back on UI5/Vera3, and I remember Vera couldn’t keep up. As I remember I had to disable some automation to send the bathrooms lights & fans back to manual.

But last week I hosted a NYE party with probably 25 guests in my home, and UI7/VeraSecure did everything it was supposed to do without issue. Turned on the kitchen lights when people walked into the kitchen, bathroom lights and fans when people walked into all three bathrooms, patio lights when the door opened, stair lights on & off on both sets of stairs. Often two or three of these lights were being tripped at the same time. In additional Vera did her other tasks, like cycling the hot water re-circulation, locking the front door when left unlocked, monitoring all the other sensors, and updating my Syslog server with every single sensor trip and switch action.

With all the negative posts here, many of which I share the same sentiments, I wanted to post positively. With enough work, we can still do way more with Vera than VeraControl/Elzo has effectively designed the product to handle.

5 Likes

Pretty amazing that it is the exact opposite of my experience… I had a very steady and stable setup while having two people in a house and 7.30 running with all the plugins and scenes offloaded but things went crazy once I got 10 people in the house. Maybe I did not put enough work into it… How many nodes and how many wireless or secure nodes is your system running?

My setup is a little different than most here, and that may partially explain.

For lights and bathroom fans and other functions I want to be immediate, I don’t use mesh-network sensors to determine when to trigger. I use direct-response sensors - mostly EnOcean and some 2Gig/VeraLink. I have 20 EnOcean occupancy sensors that report directly to the EnOcean USB connected to my VeraSecure. This has three advantages over a Z-wave sensor: 1) As the trigger is direct, only the command to the z-wave switch to turn on the lights has to traverse the Z-wave network. 2) The EnOcean devices only report motion every 60 seconds 3) There is no lack of motion command from the EnOcean sensors that needs to be processed, effectively you start a timer and when no additional 60 second positive motions are detected, you un-trip the device.

I build my PLEGs as what I call “confirmative”, meaning I make sure no other z-wave command is being sent by the same PLEG at the same time. If one bathroom light is in the process of turning on, I hold subsequent bathroom changes until it completes. I don’t do this across my 11 PLEGs, just within the same one. After a lot of testing to eliminate deadlocks, I find it isn’t the really number of simultaneous z-wave commands being sent across the system, but the number being generated by the same source device. I realize this assumes things about the threading model for which we may not have any real evidence, but I tested this to death and no longer experience deadlocks.

Approximate system size:

  • 60 Z-wave nodes, mostly lights, fans, or plugs.
  • 20 EnOcean sensors
  • 22 DSC Alarm devices
  • 4 VeraLink/2 Gig sensors
1 Like

@wilme2 can you shed more light on these EnOcean devices? was just reading a bit about them, but their website does not make it very easy to determine what one would need. any help is greatly appreciated

I am not generally going to encourage people to use EnOcean. The plug-in is essentially abandoned, and only has been fully tested on Occupancy Sensors and Light Level Sensors. This forums’s experience is documented on the plug-in thread here: EnOcean ESP3 Gateway plugin - General Plugin Discussion - Ezlo Community

Thanks! Indeed this explains a lot. First only having 60 zwave nodes and second because these nodes are AC powered and command receivers and are not sensors and my problems seem to all be stemming from battery operated sensors… It is an elegant solution working around the vera’s zwave problems. If I was to do something like this, I would just migrate to a different zwave platform altogether. The got CAN appear to be coming from my Zooz ZSE040 when they update humidity, temperature, battery or luminosity values and I have about 40 of them. The NONCE_GET flood appear to be coming from all my secure class devices which are these same ZSE040, Linear GD00Z garage door openers and Yale locks. These seem to be the source of all my delays and crashes.

This topic was automatically closed 60 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.