Forgot to add there’s nothing untoward in the HA logs.
What about Sonoff or Shelly for the light switches? They are not ZigBee, but should be usable in the UK as far as I know.
It’s sonoff I’m looking at next, for the ceiling rose. Need to keep wall switch functionality though and the way the house is wired I’m not sure I’ll be able to get the switch wires to the Sonoff on them all, so would need a decent wifi ‘soft’ switch, something which I don’t think exists (does it?!)
I’m sorry I don’t understand. What do you mean with ‘soft’ switch?
As far as I understand if you place the Sonoff behind the switch the normal functionality would still be there but in addition you should be able to also control it with HA. But maybe somone who uses Sonoff can give your more insights.
I had similar issues (I tried to update the firmware via the phoscon app and for whatever reason it seems to have failed and wouldnt recognise in anything afterwards) I raised an issue on Github and after some back and forth I got it working again, I’m trying to find the link for my issue for you to try but I am in work and can’t remember my git login details.
Basically their documentation had links to out of date packages, so dependencies werent being met etc. Once someone pointed this out it updated successfully, put it in my Pi, set up the add-on and it worked straight away.
I get instant updates (unless my wife turns off he nursery light at the switch, then it has a very slight delay-less than 1 second but more than instant?).
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I’m sorry I don’t understand. What do you mean with ‘soft’ switch?
As far as I understand if you place the Sonoff behind the switch the normal functionality would still be there but in addition you should be able to also control it with HA. But maybe somone who uses Sonoff can give your more insights.
Can’t put the Sonoff behind the switch; no neutral there. Some light positions don’t have the switch line near to the ceiling rose either, so can’t attach the switch to the Sonos. By ‘soft’ switch I meant a button that talked to HA for me to link to a light for this functionality.
I can’t help with the sonoff stuff.
But the “soft” switch exists if I correctly understand your needs. I’m actually doing it like this, because I live in a rented apartment. I have Philips Hue bulbs, but you can also use the Ikea ones or any other bulb supported by deconz. For the switch I use Philips Hue Dimmer switch, but you can also buy some aqara buttons for this in case you only wanna toggle the lights. I use the the other buttons of the Hue switch to do other things like start music etc.
What I did got a sonoff rt tasmota it and got 433mhz switches
I can’t help with the sonoff stuff.
But the “soft” switch exists if I correctly understand your needs. I’m actually doing it like this, because I live in a rented apartment. I have Philips Hue bulbs, but you can also use the Ikea ones or any other bulb supported by deconz. For the switch I use Philips Hue Dimmer switch, but you can also buy some aqara buttons for this in case you only wanna toggle the lights. I use the the other buttons of the Hue switch to do other things like start music etc.
Seen the Aqara buttons but it’s still ZigBee; I must say I’m shy of it due to my lag issues and my time being more scarce than I’d like for tinkering.
What I did got a sonoff rt tasmota it and got 433mhz switches
Can you go into more detail on this? Sounds promising.
Bit of an update - status reporting dead on the Aqara switch again. Turning it on does the right thing and turns it on, then the switch in HA goes straight back off meaning I can’t turn off the light again, as HA send the ON command thinking it’s off.
Have you tried a different zigbee channel?
On the reported slowness
I have 86 Zigbee devices on my Deconz / Conbee II network.
- 30 bulbs/lamps (mains)
- 11 smart plugs (mains)
- 25 remote controls (battery)
- 13 motion sensors (battery)
- 7 window/door/vibration (battery)
And I have no lag. No delay at all under normal use. It can happen that a Philips remote (4-button) looses connection and has to be pressed again and in rare cases you need to press all 4 buttons to get it to connect to a valid router but they also had this problem when they were on a Philips Hue bridge and it actually got much better when they moved to Deconz).
There are a few things I personally always do. If I add any integration to HA and something goes wrong I take the time to start over again from clean. And HA does a bad job of cleaning up removed or failed devices. There are often devices left behind in the JSON files stored in the .storage directory.
I always clean what I can from the web UI first. Then I stop HA and walk through all the files in .storage and remove the sections that HA did not clean out. Remember to have make copies of all files before you do this. If you remove one comma too many HA will not startup.
Always clean out cruft.
Poor radio connection can cause trouble and it is good advice to use a USB extender cable to get the Conbee away from the computer. But do not use too long because then that can cause issues. 1 or 2 meters is what you need. You just need the stick away from other noise sources.
Do not have a Wifi router or access point very close to the stick. Even if you use different channels, very strong radio signals can block the reception of the Zigbee receiver. And the same goes with the devices. If you place a zigbee bulb 30 cms from a Wifi router it may also get trouble with the noise. The noise drops rapidly. Going from 10 cm to 1 meter makes a huge difference. And there is nothing unique with Deconz and Conbee. It is the same advice with a Zigbee2MQTT installation. You deal with radio.
I personally run my Zigbee on the Zigbee channel 25 and I have set my 2.4 GHz Wifi access points to channels 1 and 6. This way Wifi and Zigbee within my own house do not share spectrum.
Zigbee2MQTT and Deconz do not show the linking map the same way. Deconz only shows links between battery devices and routers that have recently been active. That does not mean they will not link when you press the button on a remote or open a window. After deconz has started you need to wait a long time and maybe “massage” the sensors to send updates to see a full map. I think Zigbee2MQTT may cache the connection mapping. You know your Deconz network is working correctly when you can see events immediately in HA and lights turn on immediately when you click (less than 1 second). If it takes longer then there is something wrong with the installation.
Last. There are certain Zigbee devices that are simply not compatible with each other. It is known that some Xiaomi devices cannot route other devices. It is known that Osram plugs always shows as unavailable in the Philips Hue apps on a Philips Hue bridge. When you have things that are not compatible - get rid of them. Life is too short to fight with crappy devices. It is surely not Conbee/Deconz that is the weak link in anything I have thrown at it. I have never had a more stable system after I removed my Philips Hue bridge and went all in on Deconz. Also because it means all bulbs are part of same Zigbee network and I have a strong redundant mesh network.
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Have you tried a different zigbee channel?
Yup.
I was doing some work on the house yesterday and had to turn the power off a couple of times, then noticed the problem, so am wondering if it loses status updates after a power cycle. Not sure if that’s the stick or the switch, but would think it wouldn’t be the switch as I think it runs off a battery anyway when in the off position (no neutral).
@ KennethLavrsen
Thanks for the comprehensive advice.
Short answer:
- 1.5m USB extension. Other than the PC and NVR, no other electronic devices within 4m. PC and NVR don’t have WiFi.
- Tried channel swaps.
- I’ve now started over again and same issue has reappeared.
- Tempted to disable 2.4Ghz on my router altogether and stick with 5Ghz to see if that makes any difference. It’s a BT Hub 6 which has MIMO and some channel switching ability; starting to wonder if that’s part of the issue. It’s a great AP though so don’t want to get rid and will need the 2.4Ghz for garange door signal (Sonoff, when I get around to it).
Last thing
You say you run Deconz on a VM. Maybe this is where things go wrong
I run my Deconz on a 2-core slow Celeron, but I run it directly in the host Ubuntu. I prefer it this way. Running under Deconz as an addon to Home Assistant which again runs in a Docker in a VM. That is many layers that can go wrong. It is so easy to install from the Dresden Elektronik repo as long as the host is Debian based like one of the many Ubuntus. I run Ubuntu Mate.
I had a feeling this was going to come up at some point; I’ve been putting off going there 
.
I currently use the Hass.io image on an ESXi host, passing through the Conbee stick directly to the VM. It’s worked flawlessly but I do wonder if that’s where the lag is. I did it because I’m not very confident in anything but Windows and given that I’m short on the hours to play I like having the snapshot functionality; every time I’m about to make a big change I do a snapshot and can roll it back if it all goes wrong. I also use the free version of VEEAM to back up the machine (I work as a part time admin, can’t help being careful, have RAID 1 config as well 
).
Maybe I should run it on a RPi instead, though the whole point in me setting up the ESXi host was for the ability to create new VMs without having Pis strewn around the house.
@mrrodge, I do understand your dilemma. I am also running Home Assistant on ESXI and in my view running on RPI would be a big step backwards for exactly what you described. I can not talk about the ConBee Zigbee USB gateway use but I had similar experience with the ZWave world. When I bought into the ZWave world, I took a similar approach as you, I had my Hub running in path-through on ESXI and it was not working to my liking. All this reminded me of similar issues when I configured our house for Wifi. I ended up buying into Wifi appliances that gave me the flexibility for finding the sweet spots in the house for there installation. I came to similar conclusion that for the installation of the ZWave Hub, I needed more flexibility on its location in the house.
The approach that I took was I purchased a used RPI to use with the ZWave USB Hub. I also configured a bidirectional relay services for the data streams between the RPI and Home Assistant. For my configuration I installed the Socat service on the RPI to run as a server service, installed the Socat service on my CentOS 7 VM where Home Assistant resides as a client service. This configuration allowed me to find the physical sweet for the Hub.
I must add warning to the above approach, the configuration was a little more tedious than I expected. I originally had Home Assistant running from a Docker installation. I was never able to have Socat working with this configuration. I could have opted to use a different service than Socat but I opted instead to reinstall Home Assistant via the Python Wheel install. I did not try with Hass.io but I would be interested to know if that works.
There’s also this option:
A custom component that connects 2 or more HA instances. The entities just show up in HA as if they were directly connected to that instance.
I’m running Hass.io on Ubuntu server in Hyper-V on my Blue Iris box and using a separate Pi3 (HassOS) with MQTT Statestream to forward data from deCONZ (core addon) and WyzeSense (custom component) which both use USB dongles. Everything has been working very smoothly and I don’t notice any lag when states change. Not saying it’s the right way, just been working very well for me so wanted to share.
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Just to add to the frustration… Config completely untouched for a while, now getting ‘Entity not available’ in HA for both rockers on the Aqara switch. Thing is, it still shows and works in Deconz but HA won’t see it. Tried loads of reboots to no avail.
Any ideas?
Thanks.