I am having difficulty with a Yale Touchscreen z-wave door lock that does not respond reliably to commands. Sometimes when sending a lock or unlock command I will get an error that the lock is not responding. Resending the command works sometimes, other times not. The lock is located about 50-60 feet away from my VeraPlus. I have 17 mains powered z-wave devices in my network and the lock is showing 8 neighbors, with the closest being just 2 feet away. All other devices in the network seem to be working properly. The lock works reliably every time if it is close to the VeraPlus.
My best guess is that that the problem is with the network, that one of the lock’s neighbors is wonky, or there is some kind of interference. I’m out of ideas, so any thoughts of how I can track down this problem would be greatly appreciated.
Do you know if the mains powered z-wave devices support secure beaming? Not all devices do, and if not they cannot function as a repeater for the lock. Which model lock? (Z-wave or Z-Wave+)
The lock is a Yale model YRD256-ZW2. It is z-wave plus. Of the 8 neighbors, 3 are z-wave plus (including the device closest to the lock) and all support beaming according to the Info Viewer report.
I looked at the other thread and I think my problem is a little different. I am able to operate the lock remotely, but only intermittently. I had originally paired the lock close to the VeraPlus before I installed it in the door. When I encountered the problems, I tried bringing the VeraPlus close to the lock and excluded/included it again and it worked flawlessly. I moved the VeraPlus back to its normal location and gave the lock a chance to find its neighbors. Now I’m having the same problems as before with the lock not responding reliably. It seems the lock only works as it should when in direct range of the VeraPlus.
With Yale standard Z-wave locks (non Z-Wave +) under UI5 and Vera3, that was my experience. I could only get my locks to work reliably when in direct communication with the Vera3. In fact in UI5, I hardcoded the locks with a manual “0” z-wave route (forcing them to communicate directly).
When I finally mirgrated to VeraSecure and UI7 in January of 2018, I was obviously unable to hardcode a z-wave route, but the locks worked OK with Vera’s own routing. I don’t know if Vera chose a direct route or what, but only occasionally did they report to be offline or fail to execute a command. In February of this year I replaced them with Z-Wave Plus models, as part of other Z-Wave Plus upgrades to make my z-wave network rock solid. The first few days after installing the new locks they had a few hiccups, likely as the automatic z-wave heals adjusted for them, but ever since they have been completely reliable.
wilme2 - thanks for your input on this. I think I’m going to try temporarily disabling some of the non z-wave plus neighbors to see if it has any effect on the problem.
Just thought I would provide an update on this. I tried adding and removing devices near the lock with no improvement. I ended up moving my Veraplus to a location where it could communicate directly with the lock and now it seems to be 100% reliable. FWIW I was getting multiple trips/untrips on the door sensor whenever it opened or closed and now that the Veraplus is closer I just get just one trip/untrip per open/close. So it seems at least in my environment that some z-wave devices will not work reliably in a mesh network and need to communicate directly with the Veraplus to operate as they should.
You might want to check what each node has for neighbors listed. It is possible that either your mesh is broken somewhere or that it was never properly set.
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