Failed Zone Change

[FullBore]

In the last couple of hours I have had two notifications that attempts to remotely implement a change to different zones failed.

This is after the server seems to be off-line for over three hours earlier today.

Very annoying when one is away from home!

NJSS

[FullBore]

A day later & I am still getting the occasional "Honeywell Home's Total Connect Comfort - Alert: Failed Zone Change".

"We would like to notify you that your attempt to remotely implement a change to the following zone failed at 12/15/2020 14:06:38: Zone: Living room"

Clearly the message is getting to the Honeywell Server - why the failure? All seems to be OK at this end save for the failed change in temperature for the living room; there are no error messages on the controller.

Help please.

NJSS

[FullBore]

There is still some sort of problem...

Earlier this morning I upped the temperature of two zones as I have family staying for a couple of nights in rooms normally kept cool. One "took" immediately, the other took half a dozen attempts over maybe five minutes before it registered.

NJSS

[DorrisMancer]

FWIW the same happened to me last night.

[DBMandrake]

Failed zone change can sometimes be caused by sending two contradictory commands from the phone app (or API) in close proximity, for example sending a set point change to a zone and then immediately sending a different set point change to the same zone before the first one applied.

But it can also be caused by problems at the Honeywell servers.

[paulockenden]

But it can also be caused by problems at the Honeywell servers.

Or your broadband.

Or the WiFi connection to your controller.

So many possible causes. Some of which are easier to eliminate than others.

[DBMandrake]

Funnily enough I've never seen the failed zone change messages if my internet connection is down. On several occasions now if I try to apply an override when the connection is down it just pretends that the setting was applied without error but of course it doesn't happen.

Failed Zone change seems to be triggered due state consistency problems between controller and the state held at the Honeywell servers rather than a pure loss of communication. (Think of it like a sync error when doing bi-directional syncing of data between two devices)

The Alexa integration used to generate failed zone change warnings all the time if you tried to issue multiple set point changes at once (I have an Alexa "goodnight" routine which applies a manual override to 6 zones all at once - which almost always gave me failed zone change for at least one zone) however this has been fixed more recently - now the Alexa integration with Honeywell seems to send the set point changes one at a time and wait for the controller to action and confirm each change before sending the next one.

As a result it can take more than a minute for the 6 zones to one by one change their override, but at least it works reliably now.

[paulockenden]

Maybe it doesn't happen if there's a full comms outage (perhaps if the session is down then the remote end just drops the change). But I have seen it with 'iffy' comms. In one instance where my ISP had substantial flapping on one of its main peering points, so lots of packet loss, and in another instance where one of the nodes in my mesh wifi had decided to get stroppy, again dropping packets.

But maybe, as you say, that could generate the state change issue. Either the command is dropped/garbled on the way down, or the next state dump from the controller to the API infrastructure.

Dunno the logic, but iffy comms can causes such failures.