A complete n00b, just started to fiddle around with HA, aiming at controlling my home.
Purchashed 2 pcs SMLight Ethernet Zigbee coordinators, placed one in the house and the other in the garage. Full network connectivity.
I connected 2 Zigbee relays to the coordinator in the house, and it worked well.
Now I have moved one of the relays to the garage, right next to the coordinator.
Removed relay from HA, Factory reset and put it to pairing mode but no way I can get it connected in Add Integration → Add Zigbee device.
Read somewhere that to have 2 coordinators I will need 2 “networks”, is that true?
Will I have to move to Z2M instead of ZHA and what does it take?
You can only have one coordinator in a Zigbee network, so you are looking at two separate networks.
Only one of those can be ZHA, but ZHA and Z2M can run at the same time.
Each of your devices has to belong to one Zigbee network or the other, no crossover.
You can only have one instance of Home Assistant on your LAN, so if you’re going to run ZHA and Z2M, both coordinators would be on the same PC.
Zigbee is not a good choice if you want to cross a distance between two buildings - the signal is very weak.
There’s a big Zigbee section in the “Cookbook”:
2 Likes
Thank you for your swift reply!
As you understand I am not yet on top of this concept…
Initially I thought it would be a good idea to go for ethernet coordinators so that I can place them wherever they give the best Zigbee coverage.
HA hardware is for the time being a RPi5 which I might as well stow away in some cabinet.
What is your recommendation for covering both house and the garage/barn, which is 25m apart from the house?
In the future I might even expand to yet another buiding even farther away but that’ll be another day.
LAN connectivity is available everywhere.
I see that the SLZB-06 can operate in 4 different modes:
Will any of these help me out?
If your LAN is available everywhere, use Zigbee in the main house and wi-fi in the other buildings.
I would agree WiFi for a few wired devices, but battery WiFi devices mostly suck (if you can find what you need without cloud dependencies).
If you want zigbee, traditionally most here have run multiple z2m instances for this scenario. You could have ZHA for the main building, and two z2m instances for the outbuildings (or ditch ZHA and have three z2m instances). This solution is tried and true.
Matter over Thread might be an option. I don’t know if you can run multiple instances of HA’s Thread add-on neeeded for the slzb-06, but theoretically, you could use a different stand alone border router for the outbuildings.
I have no experience, but the beta “zigbee hub” option looks like it is purpose built for this scenario, but device support looks limited.
- ZHA for one of your buildings
- Z2MQTT for another
- Z2MQTT Edge (dev version) for your third building
- LAN coordinator located in each of the above buildings
You will have 3 separate meshes, but it solves your problem of trying to get the mesh to communicate over large distances. All are pretty straightforward to install if you’re just starting out, and you can install multiple instances of the Z2MQTT integration later once you gain more confidence