I’m having some difficulty with my ZHA network, but I’m not able to go over to Z2MQTT as I’m heavily using combined presence and lux sensors that people who are a lot more experienced than I am haven’t been able to run on it, but which run flawlessly on ZHA.
To try to get around this, I’m looking to run both types of network on the same machine, with the ZHA for my Lux sensors and Z2 for everything else.
I have a Sky Connect dongle for ZHA, and I’ve ordered a Sonoff E Plus for the Z2.
I’ve seen a lot of threads with people asking questions about running both networks at the same time, with a lot of good advice, but what I’m looking for is a really good case study where someone goes through their own installation and details what they did, what he best practices are for setting this up, and the problems that they ran into.
Preferably something aimed at the home automation\setup side, rather than from a custom coding perspective.
I’ve been running HA for just over 6 years. My first zigbee dongle was a ITead_Sonoff_Zigbee_3.0_USB_Dongle_Plus which is old enough to consider replacing. I started out just using ZHA. After a year I bought a duplicate dongle which I use with Z2MQTT. I think I changed the frequency so it wouldn’t interfere with the first dongle. They’re both usb with long cables putting them about 6 - 7 feet apart from each other & at least 3 feet from my HA rpi5. I use a power USB hub to connect them. I may have moved a few devices from ZHA to the other, but I had so many I was daunted by the task, so generally I added new devices to the Z2MQTT which I’ve found more user-friendly. Sometimes it seems as though the devices choose their protocol, & I’m not concerned.
I have about 40 devices on Z3MQTT & 20 on ZHA & I’ve never had any problem with interference or pairing.
My skyconnect becomes unstable if I go above 40 devices, any new ones start dropping out. I’ve had this through three fresh installs of HA on three different hardware platforms. This happens even if the new devices are really low data devices like smoke alarms that don’t update constantly.
A lot of people are. I’ve found a lot of troubleshooting threads, but I’m trying to find a case study where someone has made a project of it and documented what they did, rather than where someone is looking for help after the fact.
There’s nothing much to document. Only thing you need to watch out for is that you don’t use the same zigbee channel on both networks as mentioned above.
Other than that, it’s no different than following the installation docs for each integration. The 2 networks won’t know about each other, so any case study you find which uses a single integration will apply to you.
I’ve had both running in parallel for 5 years now. Not saying “Trust me bro”, but there really is nothing to it.
Just bite the bullet & try it out yourself - you can always switch back if you run into issues.
Make sure you have adequate separation between Zigbee channels.
Make sure you have adequate separation between Zigbee and any 2.4 GHz Wifi channels.
Do you have any plans for using Thread later / again make sure you have frequency separation.
The ZHA integration sometimes sees the adapter for Z2M - but I run dockerized, so that prevents ZHA from messing with the device (its not shared inside the docker container).
Each Zigbee network will have less Routers on it, than one combined Zigbee network.
However the major issue is that Z2M is far more difficult to configure than ZHA - in my case I had good docs for the ZBT-2 so it was a 10 minute job, but others on this forum have struggled for days.
I went with ZBT-1 for that very reasons, it’s been rock solid for nearly 3 years, and suddenly I can’t keep things connected. I’d rather not scrap everything and start again, but this is the next best thing. I’m going to try to build a stable Z2M network while keeping my unstable ZHA one running, so I’m not left with nothing while I get Z2M running.
I’ve got a bunch of devices that other people say only run well with ZHA, so I’m going to try and see if a much smaller ZHA network is stable.