We have a large facility that has 8" thick poured concrete walls that separate internal rooms from external (ie. there are multiple layers of walls - exterior, and then interior). I have been using a SMLite Ultima3 coordinator with Zigbee and getting mixed results. We have about 75 devices that need to communicate within the facility (lights, outlets, WLED controllers, etc.) and about 60% work fine, but even with using multiple SLZB-06 units as routers, and that the in wall outlets are all routers as well, it fails to reliably reach endpoints - particularly those that are distanced from the coordinator in Zigbee.
As this coordinator also supports Z-Wave and we purchased the Z-Wave radio for this, I believe that the lower frequencies of Z-Wave may help in getting signals through these walls. We have all rooms cabled with multiple Cat6A runs so we could do this with Ethernet and we also have a Unifi Wifi Mesh network that seems to be very good for signal strength throughout the building. Just having major reliability issues with Zigbee here.
Can anyone verify that using Z-Wave in conjunction with Zigbee here might be a solution? There are some critical devices that I need to reach reliably (like power controllers for HVAC units) and I’m fine with a mixed protocol solution for this.
Hi,
I have good experience with z-wave, albeit not with walls this thick. For me it is still working through two two layer brick walls. Probably best not to use long range so you can build up a mesh to get from one side to the other.
I had trouble with Zigbee reaching a relay and a few sensors on the electric gate and postbox, 20m from the nearest corner of the house, which is 8"/200mm concrete block walls throughout. I switched to Z-wave for the troublesome items and reliability has been faultless, even though the Z-wave co-ordinator is in a all-concrete IT cupboard and the nearest Z-wave router device is behind a chimney breast and two walls. (The Zigbee co-ordinator is a SLZB device running on PoE in another part of the house for that reason). If you already have a Z-wave co-ordinator, it’s easy enough to swap out the Zigbee devices that have unreliable connections, and you can re-use them elsewhere in the house.
Z-Wave can run alongside Zigbee in HA, but it is a separate network with Z-Wave end devices, so adding the radio won’t extend the routes to your existing Zigbee devices (HA setup docs). Whether it improves coverage through those walls needs testing at the actual locations.
Before replacing hardware, are you using ZHA or Zigbee2MQTT, and which two or three light/outlet models are unreliable? Do they become unavailable, or stay available but miss commands?
Also, are the WLED controllers affected, or only the Zigbee devices? HA’s WLED integration connects by IP/hostname, so those failures would need checking separately from the Zigbee mesh.
Good to know. I’ll give it a try and a simple plugin relay that is at a distance from the coordinator. Our SMLite Ultimate3 does have Z-Wave radio, so it wouldn’t be hard to test it.
The only consistent thing I can see which shows devices more affected than others are motion sensors. The WLED controllers we have seem pretty solid, or at least the same as Shelly controllers for downlights, etc.
Wifi’s lowest frequency (and most used by IoT) is 2.4ghz.
Zwave is in the 900mhz range.
Zigbee depends on location, I don’t know enough to answer.
Lower frequency penetrates better, and goes further. It can find its way through/around walls better.
But from my experience the real answer is – you have to try it. There are too many variables in construction materials, environment, local interference, etc.
But frequency is at least as important as power in penetration. You need both to be adequate.
Multistorey as well? The floors may be even worse, with reinforced steel meshes.
In case you think @Spiro is joking: This would likely be the most reliable option. I gave the same advice to a friend that had WiFi issues at home in a house like this.
The reality is that lower frequencies oenetrate better. As an example, the ideal frequency for mobile phones is actually the FM spectrum, but good luck to them getting that; the reason being penetration into buildings. Hence microcells, voice over WiFi, etc. ws born. In the end, the moment you have metal in the floors or walls, basically all of the spectrum is affected negatively.
As was said above: Test it though, unless you know for sure what’s going in those walls.
A good way to understand the signal penetration it is like this analogy that shifts the wavelengths so you can actually visualise what’s happening.
Think of Zigbee and Wifi (which use the same frequency band) as blue light.
Think of Z-Wave as red light.
The signals trying to get through a masonry wall are like the blue and red lights trying to get through a moderately opaque orange filter.
Very little of the blue light will get through.
Quite a lot of the red light will get through.
If you increase the signal strength aka the brightness of the lights, both will get more light through, but that doesn’t change which one is better, you’ll still get more of the the red light than blue light.
The wifi / zigbee / z-wave problem is like the lights and the filters, the signal transmitters are all slightly different, there may be other signals causing interference (but much less likely with Z-Wave as the band is not used so much), and the masonry differs like different filters, some will look absolutely opaque to some specific frequency bands, whereas others will have different shades and allow different spectrum bandwidths through.
The bottom line with this sort of thing is while you might be able to make a reasonable assumption based on other’s results, you really have to try it out in your own situation.
If concrete is the problem, then Z-Wave is likely to be the best for a wireless solution.
Perfect! Really absolutely no need to build a new (mesh) infrastructure. Just make use of the solid one already installed! Focus on wifi and ethernet devices running esphome
You could use a PoE zigbee coordinator in each room but having that many instances of Z2M would be messy. I’d just go with a wifi access point in each room.
