How to speed up a units response on the Vera, maybe...

[James Sentman]

Today I decided it was time to replace some switches in the garage fro old X10 relay switches which are becoming less and less reliable with time to fancy new expensive HomeSeer ZWave relay switches. The conversion and addition of them to the Vera went without a hitch. I did not have to bring the vera out to them and try to do it via the buttons on the Vera since they are all ZWave plus. Unfortunately when I changed their names to swap them from the old unit names the response time was horrible I opened the garage door and could have gotten a coke from the fridge and been back inside before the lights would have come on. I let them sit for an hour or so thinking they might re-discover their paths or something but they stayed with a ludicrous 15 to 20 second response time.

I have always advised people to wait 24 hours or so before being upset as the Vera does some rerouting overnight, but I was impatient today and logged into the web page and told it to do a “configure device now” for them even though they were fully configured. That made no difference. Then I went looking for the rediscover neighbors command and it wasn’t there. I had implemented it in XTension as it was in the documentation so I then ran that just:

tell xUnit “name of the unit” to updateNeighbors()

and 5 minutes later it was responding as quickly or more so than the original X10 device it replaced. The effect has stuck as I just tested it 5 hours later. Under the advanced tab for the unit in the Vera UI it still lists only a single neighbor that it knows about, which is silly considering how many are close by so maybe that hasn’t just updated yet. or maybe it had nothing to do with that I don’t know but the two things did correlate very obviously. But then we all know that correlation is not causation ;) It might have run that overnight and fixed everything but I was too impatient to wait.

I know that some folks have had problems with certain vera units responding very slowly compared to others for no apparent reason that we were ever able to discover. Please try doing an updateNeightbors() call like the above on them and see if that helps at all. I’m surprised that if it actually works it’s nowhere to be found in the Vera UI but then maybe I’m not. I certainly can’t imagine that it can hurt anything. I would do one at a time rather than issuing a lot of the commands at once as well as I think it probably causes a lot of traffic on the network and ties up nearby units. So don’t make scripts that run it continually or anything like that, but do give it a try on a problem unit or 2 and see what happens.


Thanks,
 James


James Sentman                       http://www.PlanetaryGear.org		http://MacHomeAutomation.com