Indeed 
.. but why do you have to do this "manual" retry for failed modbus reads ?
why not just wait for the next request and keep only the successful replies ?
if 1min is not fast enough just speed up the polling .. every 10sec
@craigcurtin is polling every 200ms without a hickup.
Check the communication .. are you using rs485 .. .. are you requesting many registers more than the device can handle ?
Its not possible to read the config of another node 
ps. I opened a new issue on Modbus node's github for the Empty msg on Modbus fail
