I am taking the plunge and migrating my Z-Wave sensors over to ZHA. I am removing the Z-Wave Door Sensors and am replacing them with Aquara ones. Most of these are working fine but my Back Door sensor which was working is now coming up as unavailable.
Having read around the subject I am looking to add some powered router nodes to the network. I am looking for recommendations of what I could use?
I already have Hue and Trader lights talking to a Hue Hub.
CC2530 (or CC2530 + CC2591) with external antenna + router firmware make for a good ZHA router:
I also read that Digi XBee + router firmware make great routers.
Good simple device is however otherwise IKEA Trådfri Signal Repeater
But I do not recommend the IKEA Tradfri Wireless Control Outlet plug.
Important is to make sure they are left powered on so that no one power it of or unplug it by accident.
This is a rather bizarre move to resolve such a problem since zigbee is much more interference prone, running in the very busy 2.4GHz band, and is also shorter range due to the physics of running at higher frequency than z-wave. It is better at self managing its network but since you are adding repeaters, I wonder why you did not add a zwave device as a repeater instead.
I have a number of Z-Wave powered devices all of which can act as repeaters. I also have a couple of dedicated repeaters. However Z-Wave has just not proved reliable with Home Assistant.
Sometime down the migration path I have to say that the ZHA sensors have proved much more reliable than the Z-Wave ones they replaced. The INNR plugs that I chose as repeaters are working well and doing their job.
I am now migrating the remaining Z-Wave devices over to the newer MQTT based openzwave integration
Router devices from Centralite, General Electrics, Iris, Ledvance/OSRAM/Sylvania, PEQ, Securify, SmartThings are known to not work with Xiaomi/Aqara devices.
Better results can be achieved by using IKEA, Nue/3A Home, (some OSRAM/Sylvania), XBee series 2 and 3, and CC2530 or CC2531 with router firmware.
Another tip there is SONOFF BASICZBR3 as that has a CC2530 with router firmware