I’m having major zwave issues with my IQ4.
The saga started yesterday, when I went to add a device, clicked “Add device” on the panel, and it asked me a question (which I unfortunately didn’t read) and then it said “Deleting all zwave devices, please wait”
UGH!! I pressed the ‘add device’ button on the left side of the panel but for some reason it registered as a press at the extreme right where the remove all zwave devices button was?? CRAZY>
Anyway that is not the issue for this post.
Now that I have to completely start over I’m having massive problems re-adding devices. I’m going through the standard motions of excluding, factory reset the device, re-add, etc. But more often than not I’m getting S2 auth failures where it adds as insecure, OR adds as “other device”. ?? Also the panel seems wonky. Tried many reboots and various things.
(By “wonky” I mean things like when trying to clear a device the panel says something like ‘getting ready to clear device…’ forever and I have to reboot the panel to get it off the screen, etc.)
In the end I have a small group of devices added so far that seem to work, but I had to add each about 3-4 times before the S2 would work ? This is taking forever. (About 6 hours of work to get those devices added!)
Now I’m noticing trouble trying to add my second garage door. At this point I ran a zwave daughter card test and it is failing.
Could I possibly have a bad zwave card in the panel?? Please help. I’m so frustrated that I lost 2 months of work building all of this automation and now it’s gone, but then to add to the pain I can’t rebuild the network!
thanks.
Update: The zwave card tests ok (green) now.
I also removed the two devices that were still in a bad state (one was a temp sensor coming up as other, and the other was a garage door coming up as other without S2.)
Then I ran a network rediscovery. on the zwave map I could see one switch with a red connection in the network that eventually went green. Odd that it is in the same switch box as another zwave switch that is solid green. It seemed to resolve itself after a few seconds.
I’m taking a coffee break and will let things settle for a bit. 
I sympathise, that is frustrating. Out of curiosity when you saw that failure of the Z-wave radio during the daughtercard test were you on battery power? I’ve seen some similar slow responsiveness on battery which can be exacerbated when frustrated and trying to resolve things quickly. How long is your panel power cable?
It is odd to see the fail result, but I do see immediately before that time stamp on your panel, in Alarm.com I see network rediscoveries were run and link quality checks, with an automated sync command to check for device changes. Those likely had an impact if you see a pass otherwise now.
It is possible that fail is a red herring or it could suggest you are actually seeing some defects in the z-wave radio.
I would generally expect to see the failure occur again if it is a bad radio. If you reboot the panel, wait 15 minutes without doing anything, then run a system test on the daughtercards, does it pass or fail?
The panel is wall mounted on power ( I don’t take it off to run only on battery)
The power line is about 25 ft (estimating since it was a re-use of the wire from our old ADT Command panel).
I will try the reboot test you indicated. However I’ve noticed that if I just wait a bit the fail on the card goes away. It almost seems like the card is maybe too busy to ‘take the test’ so to speak. When activity dies down the test passes again. But just a theory.
I’ll do the reboot test and report back. Thanks
I will try the reboot test you indicated. However I’ve noticed that if I just wait a bit the fail on the card goes away. It almost seems like the card is maybe too busy to ‘take the test’ so to speak. When activity dies down the test passes again. But just a theory.
That’s the assumption I made looking at the commands that were going through at the timestamp of that failed test in your image. It looked like the z-wave radio was probably still processing commands.
So, I did the reboot and waited over 30 mins. The test passes.
However I have two malfunctioning devices - both alarm.com temp sensors, which I have literally sitting on top of the IQ4 panel, and were just added this morning, and have never left the top of the panel.
I also have an alert in alarm.com about a driveway light switch malfunction, but I deleted that device over 1.5 hours ago from the panel. So, I just sent a resend devices command from the Surety site to get these back in sync.
I’m wondering if I should try one or both of the following:
- A hard reboot of the panel by taking it off the wall and pulling the battery for 15 mins.
and/or
- Walking through the house and factory resetting and then clearing all devices that are not yet added to the panel. I’m wondering if devices previously joined are somehow pinging the zwave card in the panel and flooding it with packets (almost like a self-made denial of service attack?)
Have you gone through the exclusion process for each device? Remove all devices on the panel won’t clear the internal data for the devices, but running a clear device on each one will.
You could factory reset them instead. I would try excluding all of them one by one, reboot the panel, then see if there is any difference.
The Alarm.com temp sensors are NWI only devices (they get routes set as they pair and not during rediscovery) so those should be added last and only when installed in their final positions.
Update: Using the panel, I removed the few devices i had re-added, including the thermostat and temp sensors. I then did a ‘remove all zwave devices’ followed by a panel reboot and a subsequent re-send of the zwave list to alarm.com. At that point I waited a while (about 20 mins).
Once that finished, I used the IQ Installer app to clear or factory reset all of the zwave devices in my home one by one. Once all were completely excluded/cleared, I then started to re-join the devices.
I started with wall switches, then smart plugs, then dimmers, then garage doors, and finished with a zooz relay I have. Everything added correctly, with S2 and proper identification, on the first try! I also then re-sent the command to sync zwave to alarm.com.
I still have not re-added the thermostat or temp sensors. I’ll do those later. For now I’m just letting all the new devices get digested by Alarm.com before I start to setup any automatons or rules. I also will run a network discovery again before I make any more changes/additions. So far, so good!!
Phew! I was sweating there for a minute! Thanks for your help.
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