Question
My devices are going crazy turning On and Off by themselves, is my house possessed?
Answer
We do receive some very rare reports of what can possibly be best described as a haunted house with multiple devices randomly being turned On/Off for no apparent reason.
Upon investigation we’ve found that this is usually down to a corrupted Z-Wave device flooding the Z-Wave network and causing spurious events to occur.
Prime suspects are any battery powered devices that may be going flat or mains powered devices that have got "stuck in a loop".
Solution
Unfortunately identifying the correct device can be a bit of a challenge, there's no way to do this automatically so you'll need to be prepared to do some manual diagnosis!
Start by removing batteries out of the battery powered devices and checking at each stage the effect on your network.
If the above doesn’t narrow down the problematic device we'll need to move on to mains powered devices:
- Turn Off upstairs sockets at the Consumer Unit - does the problem go away?
- Turn Off downstairs sockets at the Consumer Unit - does the problem go away?
- Turn Off upstairs lighting circuit at the Consumer Unit - does the problem go away?
- Turn Off downstairs lighting circuit at the Consumer Unit - does the problem go away?
Once you've narrowed it down to a particular circuit, you'll have to start unplugging / disconnecting individual devices until you find the culprit.
Hopefully this will let you identify the problematic device, at which point it's worth Excluding it and Resetting it (if there's a specific reset procedure shown in the device manual).
If it’s a battery powered device then it's also worth replacing the batteries to see if that helps.
Copyright Vesternet 2016
Updated: 04/05/2016
