Z Wave

Z-Wave

What Works Today

Device Sentinel recognizes Z-Wave and a device whose integration domain is Z-Wave is classified correctly.

On a Z-Wave system, everything built from the Home Assistant event bus works identically to Zigbee2MQTT and Z-Wave. This includes rhythm learning, freeze detection, unavailable detection, and unknown detection. It includes battery threshold and falling detection, and signal recording where devices expose signal entities. The problem list, the daily brief, and all reports work properly for Z-Wave right now.

What Is Missing

Because Device Sentinel is currently tested only for Zigbee2MQTT, a Z-Wave system does not ship with some advanced features. Missing today:

• Pairing-Window Recognition: A hand re-pair during Z-Wave's pairing window is not recognized and is instead learned as the device's rhythm. The current workaround is to turn-on Maintenance Mode.
• Coordinator Outage Recognition: If the Z-Wave bridge goes down, the integration blames the devices themselves for silences instead of recognizing that they were brought down by a Z-Wave integration fault.
• A Second Opinion: Z-Wave may publish its own freeze, unavailable, unknown verdicts and the integration is oblivious to this.
• A Bridge Sensor: Even though the integration recognizes Z-Wave entities, it does not see the Z-Wave integration and cannot tell if it is running or not.

The Zigbee2MQTT versions of these features are described on Zigbee2MQTT and The Bridge and Broker Sensors.

Why Features Are Missing

These advance features cannot be built without a Z-Wave user's help because the author does not use Z-Wave on his reference system and has no Z-Wave devices. He is looking for one or two volunteer willing to work with him, provide reference data from their systems, and run a few experiments.

The Open Questions

A volunteer will help answer a few open questions. Does Z-Wave expose a readable coordinator state? What does Z-Wave emit when a pairing (permit join) window opens and closes? What do its devices' last-seen and signal entities look like in the registry? Finally, what happens on the bus when the coordinator drops and returns?

How You Can Help

First, a diagnostics download. Go to Settings, Devices and Services, Device Sentinel, select the three-dot menu, and click Download diagnostics. This file contains device names but no passwords or tokens. Open a support ticket in Issues and past the data file. Then, provide your coordinator model, roughly how many devices you have, and your mains versus battery mix. The issue will be closed after a the author's contact information is given to you.

Start the process by using the open an issue link, titled "Z-Wave reference system".