Asking the controller at startup: issue a request, see https://www.mysensors.org/download/sensor_api_20#requesting-data, imo you should as for V_STATUS.
Then your controller should respond, the response is handled by the receive()-function (=no action needed), but to get this to work, your node should not sleep (you sketch seems to be incomplete wrt. that).
But you should first switch off everyhing to have it in a defined state and avoid loading values from the EEPROM.
Wrt. to regular status info: If that's necessary, you should try to use a so called "non blocking loop", use g**gle or similar for that. Imo, it's not necessary to update the value as it doesn't change. Better use the heartbeat funcionality instead (dependend on your controller).
