I'm soo unhapppy with Fibaro now

[robw 116]

In my experience, Fibaro is one of the best, if not the best, home consumer HA solution today. It is not bug free (nothing is), but it is very good. Coupled with the Scenes, VD's and the support from many people here on the forum, it makes a fantastic system.

 

I've tested other HA systems also, so I know how to compare. One quite popular HA had confirmed issues weekly, affecting every user. Yet the company defended themselves how good they were. They also promised updates "soon" with features and fixes that took at minimum 6 months to come, often much longer or not at all.

 

I did have a problem with my motherboard which died, but Fibaro quickly replaced it and I had it back home working within days. All in all, I'm very happy with my Fibaro system, and also the Fibaro support and company!

[djashjones 3]

I wont be buying any more Fibaro kit. Having issues and Fibaro support is useless.

 

HA is coming more  popular day by day. There's so much new devices coming on the market. I think fibaro is falling behind.

[alex88 71]

On 9/29/2019 at 6:59 AM, robw said:

also the Fibaro support

 

Where do you get support for Fibaro from?

[robw 116]

12 hours ago, amilanov said:

 

Where do you get support for Fibaro from?

Please login or register to see this link.

[alex88 71]

On 10/4/2019 at 6:06 AM, robw said:

Please login or register to see this link.

 

Oh, I thought you meant some new route.

 

I have countless tickets that have never been resolved with "support".  Many of which "support" have just given up and not bothered to come back to me.

 

My experience is that this is a fun system to use when it's small and you have lots of time, otherwise you live like me "scared" to upgrade as it will take more than a week to rebuild the system and so it's better to work with something that is half broken/half working and needs automated reboots every few days than risk taking time off work, sleepless nights and paying someone to help me rebuild the system from scratch to find a new set of issues based on the latest build.

 

I pray that one day there is an all round stable release that I will upgrade to and then not touch for years... literally years. If someone can vouch for that release I would be grateful to hear about it....

 

Edited October 14, 2019 by amilanov

[robw 116]

I'm sorry to hear you have issues with it. Personally, the only issue I've had was the broken motherboard. I almost always also run the beta build of the software, and that have been stable, too. All I can think of is that you have some scenes/code that makes the system unstable, or a faulty unit. I have a some simple block scenes, and then I run a lot of UHAS scenes and VD's to drive the majority. I have a mix of Hue lights, Fibaro sensors (door sensors, fire sensors, eye sensors, water sensor, power switches) and also a power switch from another brand, an outdoor type. The HC2 covers 3 stories in the house and also outdoors. It runs very good and stable for me.

 

Send as much logs as you can to Fibaro first. If that does not work, hear with them if it is a chance that the unit itself could be malfunctioning.

 

Hope it all gets resolved!

[alex88 71]

I have been a customer of Fibaro since 2011. They have seen my system countless times over the years.

 

I have been questioned of every practise under the sun, but when the Fibaro UK expert came to my home for a week to help me rebuild my system from scratch and check all my scenes there was very little advice he gave me other than some great tips of LUA coding (in general). This was all in 2014/15. A lot of time has passed since then and I am several complete rebuilds later.

 

I am hearing much better reports from users, so maybe the next rebuild will be stable. Who knows.

[alex88 71]

On 10/4/2019 at 6:06 AM, robw said:

Please login or register to see this link.

 

Out of interest, what is the average response time when you raise a ticket with support.

 

I usually get responses to "easy" questions, ones that can be answered completely in a single email, in a relatively quick time of 2-3 days,  but the trickier ones seem to take longer to even just get a response, which is usually just the beginning of multiple emails etc before something is worked on.

 

Do you have the same experience?

 

NB: I'm asking as I'm wondering if things have changed with support as I have been inactive with the system for a long time now.

Edited October 14, 2019 by amilanov

[robw 116]

Within 24 hours I would say. Whenever I have asked support, I've gotten a quick reply, and they have showed me that they wanted to help. My experience is that Fibaro runs support very good. I've met a lot of companies over the years, and I can truly say that Fibaro does not need to be ashamed of their support, on the contrary. They have always been helpful.

[alex88 71]

What are you doing to get a reply in 24 hours?

 

Please share this with me.

[alex88 71]

On 1/28/2019 at 7:27 PM, amilanov said:

I challenge you as a company to stop developing new features and products and spend 1 whole year fixing the system. Adding more help into the app. Adding new diagnostic tools. Fixing all the top bugs. Implementing or at least trying to implement the top 10 features that users want - based on a survey. 

 

@T.Konopka

I was looking for something on the forum and re-read a post I made at the start of the year. Will we ever see more helpful diagnostics tools in the HC2?

 

Incidentally I have raised 2 tickets with support last week to help with me my system which is in a bad state after upgrading to 4.560 and being forced to go back to 4.540. I really hope I get help from support in a reasonable time. Come tomorrow it will be 1 week (for one of the tickets) with no reply other than automated messages:

 

Case Notification for #187040 - Syncing Fibaro RGBW modules from a single wall switch

Case Notification for #187197 - URGENT HELP - UNSTABLE SYSTEM AFTER UPGRADE - PLEASE HELP URGENTLY

 

[cag014 731]

6 hours ago, amilanov said:

Incidentally I have raised 2 tickets with support last week to help with me my system which is in a bad state after upgrading to 4.560 and being forced to go back to 4.540.

I'm curious, did you success to  go back to 4.540? I believe you did it by restoring 4.540 backup, right?

[alex88 71]

That's right. 

 

After I upgraded to 4.560 the system was too unstable, so I downgraded. 

 

The downgrade didn't go perfectly. I am still waiting for support to help me sort it out :

 

- UNCONFIGURED DEVICES

- NO COMMUNICATION ON SOME DEVICES

- DEAD DEVICES

- ZWAVE LAGS

- DISAPPEARING DEVICES

- LOST ASSOCIATIONS 

 

Probably something else I can't remember. And that's all on the downgraded system, back to 4.540

 

BUT and it's a big BUT, after clicking on dead devices, soft reconfiguring some devices, a few complete mesh reconfigures, turning devices on and off through the Web interface and physically and some reboots, a fair chunk of the problems have gone away.

 

The day we can look into the back end to diagnose issues ourselves will be great, as long as the tools are designed well. 

 

Until then, we are reliant on support to help us. 

 

 

[cag014 731]

This is the biggest upgrade mystery, why some users experience a huge crashes while for others everything works just fine??????

[alex88 71]

1 hour ago, cag014 said:

This is the biggest upgrade mystery, why some users experience a huge crashes while for others everything works just fine??????

 

What's interesting for me is that I was only diagnosing my slave HC2 which has over 100 devices on it. 

 

The slave runs nothing other than a single scene to reboot the box every 3 days.

 

I would love to be able to see into the back end to figure out what is going on.... And fix it myself! 

 

 

Regards 

Regards 

 

Edited October 15, 2019 by amilanov

[PepsiMac 17]

On 9/28/2019 at 10:36 PM, Sankotronic said:

So, I agree - this system is one of the best choices that HA market can give you today ?

The saddest part of this message is that given Zigbee have bought Z-Wave and the HC@ is one of the best on the market and yet is quite unreliable, I can't help wondering what the future holds....

 

The main cause of failure appears to be an impatience in the update process. Some time back, I copied and edited the following:

 

Recommended Update Procedure

1. Perform a configuration backup,

2. Reboot HC2/HCL (logic: flush out non-visible stuffs such as abnormalities, cache, hung processor threads, etc.),

3. Sanity Check for 5-15 minutes (logic: reboot usually boots up fine but just in case of unforeseeable abnormal behaviour),

4. Proceed to firmware update,

5. Clear web browser cache,

6. Terminate web browser,

7. Relaunch web browser,

8. Repeat step 5-7 if firmware update still in progress,

9. Change Freeze for 1 hour (logic: allows non-visible backend scripts/processes to complete any conversions, system changes, etc. that the new firmware has to perform).

 

I believe Sankotronic has advised on this on this forum.

 

What is irresponsible is Fibaro pushing people to update from mobile phones etc without going through a more robust process, a recipe for disaster and an indication of the lack of customer/consumer attention Fibaro observes.

[alex88 71]

12 hours ago, PepsiMac said:

What is irresponsible is Fibaro pushing people to update from mobile phones etc without going through a more robust process, a recipe for disaster and an indication of the lack of customer/consumer attention Fibaro observes.

 

I could not agree more. I now have an extra account without admin access for mobile/tablet devices that connect, but of course this just adds more admin burden to maintain this when I add/change etc devices on the HC2.

 

12 hours ago, PepsiMac said:

The main cause of failure appears to be an impatience in the update process. Some time back, I copied and edited the following:

 

I am quite concerned to upgrade as my system rebuilt time is too long. I will one day do ANOTHER complete rebuild of my system, but I don't plan this for 2 years - I want to see what happens with HC2/HC3 and other competitors first.

 

In the meantime I pray that my system holds on with:

- reboots every 3 days

- further tuning using tools like z-wave monitor to reduce traffic 

- lots of decommissioning of scenes, vds that I don't use often

- some testing of removing parts of the system to see if i can better pinpoint what is causing the zwave traffic delay and HC2 hanging issues

- fibaro support hopefully helping me in figuring out the root cause(s) issues and then fixing them (fingers crossed!)

 

 

Edited October 17, 2019 by amilanov

[cag014 731]

@amilanov

I saw that you have downloaded All-in-One Scene. May I suggest....

Please run it constantly (even as is without adding anything)

It monitors "Dead" and RPT (Repeat/Report) and overall Z-wave traffic.

If RPT is over 10% it's a problem, probably your devices configured to report too much data.

Please login or register to see this spoiler.

CPU elapsed time should be low as well.

If you've any issue with above then run Z-wave monitor to get more detail information.

Edited October 18, 2019 by cag014

[alex88 71]

On 10/18/2019 at 1:32 AM, cag014 said:

@amilanov

I saw that you have downloaded All-in-One Scene. May I suggest....

Please run it constantly (even as is without adding anything)

It monitors "Dead" and RPT (Repeat/Report) and overall Z-wave traffic.

If RPT is over 10% it's a problem, probably your devices configured to report too much data.

Please login or register to see this spoiler.

 

I'm already running zwave monitor twice a day (first thing in the morning and then again in the evening). It's bl**dy genius!

 

My system has stabilised again. I'm not going to say as stable as before the upgrade/downgrade, it needs more days testing, but it's WAY better. Woo hoo!

 

In case it helps anyone else this is what I did:

 

1. mesh rebuild entire network several times

2. manually wake up any dead nodes

3. soft reconfigure any devices reporting issues in @cag014's brilliant zwave monitor

4. individually rebuild the mesh of devices reporting issues with zwave monitor

5. here's the big one - tightened the antenna on the back of both my HC2 very tight... yes, this appears to have made  difference. After this experience I'm looking into buying a better omni-directional antenna to upgrade to - I've read lot son the forum but can't find specific product links, does anyone have any ideas?

6. Somehow, please don't ask me how as I don't know how, my lan settings on master and slave HC2 were set to DHCP not Static IP. Changing this BACK means my HC2 were not losing access to the internet and hence not "dying" each time my router was being rebooted or with intermittent internet connection drop-out issues

7. i then deleted all old scenes and vds - general house-keeping

 

Steps 3 & 4 alone wiped out 30-50% of my zwave traffic!

Step 5 - yes, user error!!!!! Take me out to the back yard and put me down gently please  

EDIT:: Step 5 - I am not sure if this was the root cause of all associated issues as I am now again today experiencing "Transfer Failed" errors. I may have spoken too soon.

 

I still have some issues that I think only support can help with - e.g. tidying up my database & device specific questions/issues.

 

Fingers crossed, it's looking good again.

 

 

 

Edited October 20, 2019 by amilanov

[cag014 731]

great news... hope your system will stabilized...