Hi everyone. I’ve recently installed around 10-15 Shelly devices and in the past week have started noticing some wifi issues. Occasionally one or two of the Shelly devices will become available, and we’re having trouble connecting to the Sonos speakers sometimes. All up there are around 40 devices on the wifi network - phones, computers, Google home, Sonos, Shelly, tablets. I have a TP-Link Archer A6 modem.
I suspect there are too many devices on the network but not sure how to solve this. Should I be trying for an extender/mesh network? Not sure this will help because range isn’t a problem, I think it’s capacity.
Do I need a more powerful router?
Or should I have a second wifi network for the 2.4ghz smart devices and another for everything else? If I did that am I able to access the devices on that network with Home Assistant connected to the main network?
At the beginning I had the same issue. I was only able to connect up to 25 devices, after that devices did not get the connection. I had many discussions with my ISP but they seems to not understand that in 2022 a modem supporting only up to 25 devices should be considered obsolete.
Before buying any router verify with your ISP which technology you need to support. In my case I was looking for a router that was supporting g.fast (up to 500mbts) and not g.vector (up to 125mbts).
Does your router offer a “Guest WiFi” or “Virtual SSID” option? If so, create a separate WiFi SSID for IoT devices, and move them off your main network.
Otherwise, purchase a better router that provides this feature. It works well.
@FredTheFrog it does offer a guest network so for the moment this sounds like the cheapest option for me to try before I go any further.
I didn’t mention in my initial post that my Shelly devices are not connected to Shelly cloud so they’re only connecting to Home Assistant over LAN. Do I need to do something special in the settings to make these available to Home Assistant if it’s connected to the router via ethernet cable?
I use two xiaomi routers for local network and i connected them in wifi mesh network. It helped but I went with tuya wifi switches and had again the same issues as yours, sometimes switches will disconnect. I tried various things and in the end I replaced majority of the light switches with zigbee one.
In my experience you will have problems with it when you pass 20 to 30 wifi devices connected to a cloud. It just doesn’t work stable as expected.
In the shelly device, enable CoIoT and add the local HA IP address and port 5683.
You can find it in shelly Internet Security - ADVANCED - DEVELOPER SETTINGS
I disagree. If you gonna buy expensive network equipment you better be sure to answer one simple question. Why do you need it?
If you buying it just to show off then it’s a hughe waiste of money.
I know I don’t need it and I won’t buy it.
If you have a lot of IOT devices Unifi kit handles it. I wasn’t asking you to buy it and why do think people are showing off because they bought them? I got most of mine second hand from eBay. They come up a lot when business close down etc.
The OP was asking for advice so I gave advice. Your tone is pretty off tbh.
I have about 70-80 devices conected to my ha instance but minority of them are wifi.
I was checking unifi but I don’t see that this devices are for me. They are great not doubt about it but they are not that great for that price.
And that was my point. Don’t have to spend ton of money on devices you do not need or doesn’t know how to use.
Beter use that money smarter to make your home smarter.
What exactly does this do? I’ve had a look and mine are currently set with CoIoT on and the peer is set to mcast. I’ve done a search and from what I can gather it prevents the device broadcasting widely across the network and instead it will target it to the Home Assistant server instead? Not sure if that understanding is correct, so if you can help explain it that would be great!
Thanks for the comment. It sounds like the mesh network didn’t solve your issue so probably won’t help in my situation either. I’ve moved the Shelly’s on to the guest network and everything is working, I’ll give it a few days to see how stability goes.
Also updating the CoIoT to target Home Assistant directly based on @pepe59 's advice, otherwise will take a closer look at Unifi (thanks @Neil_Brownlee ) and the router @Giulio12 mentioned in the earlier posts.
Hi @pepe59, I’ve tried this setting. The devices can be controlled fine from the Home Assitant UI but when I flick the physical switch which triggers the Shelly inputs, there is a significant delay (10+ seconds) before Home Assitant registers the input and fires my automation. Is that expected?
I don’t use it mostly, just automation.
I have one Shelly 1 switch here (I use 12V) and a physical switch connected to it (SW and L terminals) which I hardly ever use but I tried it now and it works instantly.
Have you updated the fw shelly to the latest version?
Did you restart Shelly?
Interesting…yes it’s the latest firmware and I also restarted the Shelly. It was only after the restart that the settings took effect and it started to slow down.
I’ve reverted all of them back to mcast but have split my 2.4ghz and 5ghz wifi to use different SSIDs (the router had a ‘smart’ setting to use a single ID and it would allocate a network based on the device). It’s been several days now and that does seem to have helped with the network congestion issues.
Long term I think I need to upgrade the router but will continue testing this for a week or so and see what happens.
For anyone else who stumbles across this thread with a similar issue, the solution for me was to purchase the Netgear Orbi router and satellite. Since then I haven’t had any issues with connectivity and all devices are working well.
