Battery Powered ZHA Device Paring (and re-pairing)

Configuration Zigbee
1

General question that a couple of searches didn’t answer for me; I have a couple of battery powered devices (motion detectors, etc.) which have a pretty weak signal. They work good enough, but there are plenty of strong routers around them.

Is there a way, without having to delete out of HA, and re-setup any automations, to re-pair these to a stronger-signaled router device?

Thanks in advance!

2

I don’t think so.

No reason to have to do anything with automations.

Just rename the re-paired devices to the same entity_id’s as the previous pairing.

3

Ahhh… ok. Should have thought of that, and you’re right… easy. Curious though, and need to think this through or experiment, but I’d likely want to disable the device in the GUI, then go take it out of the devices YAML file too, right? Just to keep that clean? I think I recall seeing that removing/disabling a device in the GUI never quite deletes out of HA.

Thanks for your quick reply!!

4

I’m not sure what you mean.

As soon as you delete the device from the ZHA integration all associated entities get removed from HA.

to be sure you can restart HA afterwards before you re-pair it again.

5

Connectivity and signal strength is beyond the scope of Home Assistant as it depends on the wireless network (WiFi, Zigbee, Z-WAVE) in use. Nothing HA can do about.

6

ZHA (and Zigbee in general) does not allow you to force a route/router for specific Zigbee devices, instead, the Zigbee network mesh is meant to be entirely self-balanced based on the last connection and LQI to nearest neighbors, with each device themselves usually switching to the best router for them every 24-hours after they collected data about LQI of routers and summed up the best result.

Problem is that not all Zigbee devices follow the Zigbee specifications strictly and are therefore not always 100% compatible with all other Zigbee devices. Aqara/Xiaomi and Tuya are infamous examples. A recommendation is to read and follow all of these general tips:

https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/zha/#best-practices-to-avoid-pairingconnection-difficulties

and

https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant.io/pull/18864 → https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant.io/pull/18864/commits/b21c49589d898d60a1a235afa7b9c148d013cfee

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