Connection problems with ZHA

[TheSmurf (Florian Vieten)]

Well.
Ill wait until tomorrow (as I cant imagine all zigbee devices stay in the network after changing the channel) and repair whats not working.
Then I know if I still am having issues or not.

Ill give message after.

@Hedda

Sorry if I snapped at you

Really no problem man! I think helping me isnt that easy, as I did understand many things here wrong. Making me a person you dont want to help.
But it maybe took a bit longer than needed - but finally we got it :o)

Thanks for continuing giving me advise! Really!

[Hedda]

@TheSmurf

edit:
when changing my zigbee channel from 11 to 25 via UI it told me that all my devices will rejoin the network and it takes about an hour.
But after confirming this (about 30 min ago now) just nothing happend.
All my 97 devices stayed inside zha (even the aqara battery ones), but in the ZHA settings channel 25 is displayed.
In zha i clicked on config, choosed channel 25 and clicked change channel.
After this I clicked on actualize configuration (at the bottom of the page).

Sounds like something maybe went wrong with your Zigbee channel change as normally all your Zigbee Router devices should come back online within 10-15 minutes (because those are usually online so recieve the change command directly) and then after that you would normally need to manually re-pair all battery-powered and other Zigbee End-Devices.

You can try power-cycle each of your mains-powered to see if they automatically connect after that, if not then you are only left with the option to re-pair them (or restore the whole Zigbee network from backup).

Regardless, note that you should not ”remove” any devices, instead only re-pair them, meaning that you follow each devices manufacture’s procesure for pairing. You do not want to remove the device from ZHA because then it will get a new entity name and that means any automations using the old entities will need to be manually reconfigured to use the new entities.

[NathanCu (Nathan Curtis)]

@TheSmurf

I will delete all the unused AP of WLAN devices (I have some shelly 2pm for example connected with WIFI but still creating thei own WLAN access point

Im gonna bet this ends up being the culprit. Just marking it down for posterity… Don’t go off path and Continue troubleshooting. You guys are on a good clip now.

[TheSmurf (Florian Vieten)]

Nope.
The problems still exist.
I found out there is an issue already opened on gihub ZHA page.
As I never had such issues for 2 years and it came out of the sudden and there are lot of people having exactly the same issue than me, im thinking it really might be a ZHA issue.
Even more after excluding all the inteference stuff.
But as the uploaded logs in this issue look exactly the same as my logs do (amd I dont have any “working” logs), i cant provide any helpfullinformation there.

But I wanted to test z2m anyway - but never did because zha was working.
After changing the zigbee channel I would need to repair all my battery powered devices anyway. So Ill install z2m tomorrow.
Some of my devices are supported better there (with more entities, I would use if I had them). But as mentioned I didnt want to change the running zha.

[TheSmurf (Florian Vieten)]

@Hedda

I still think that you should consider also reading this guide too before posting next time though:

Thats what im doing right now.

[TheSmurf (Florian Vieten)]

Some days are gone now.
In the meantime I changed the zigbee (and the wifi channel) again. Maybe something went wrong the first time or changing didnt work.
This time my network was broken, just nothing worked anymore.
So I needed to setup all my zigbee from scratch.
I found out there is an issue for zha regarding exactly my problem, but as my network crashed I dont have any logs to present anyway, and I wanted to try z2m for long time now - but just didnt, because zha worked well for me (even with some device function restrictions), and I didnt want to set up everything new. (about 100 devices now)
As I had to anyway Im now trying z2m.
Dont get me wrong - Im not saying zha works not z2m does.
But what I can say after rebuilding my whole zigbee network everything works perfectly fine now.

Thanks to all here helping me building up an almost perfect mesh network!
And obviously especially thanks to @Hedda for sharing his knowledge here and wrtiting such an awsome zigbee guide!

[clfberlin (Cliff)]

Thanks for the tip @Hedda - WiFiman led me to the source of my troubles.
I had DELIVERY-FAILED-3074 errors for about a week and was pulling my hair.

• First I moved ZHA from CH20 to CH25.
• Then I moved ZHA from a Sonoff P to a Sonoff E stick. This really improved the overall LQI-values in my mesh, but still some devices were either very slow in responding or didn’t react at all.
• Then I moved my remaining Hue devices to ZHA and got rid of the Hue Hub (CH15).
• Then I figured that maybe >100 devices were too much for ZHA and I installed a parallel Z2M network (CH11). I moved a lot of devices there, mainly battery operated end devices like temperature sensors and motion sensors (but also some strategically positioned routers).
• I also searched for WiFi interference, but used WiFiAnalyzer (which did show me a nearby AP that I didn’t know, but was no further help).

It was WiFiman that finally provided the answer. It showed more information. The unknown AP also used Bluetooth and the vendor was Espressif. With the strength of the Bluetooth signal I was able to locate the source in my son’s room. He had installed a smart device himself that created its own WiFi network, which was not only strong, but also very broad, overlapping a range of frequencies.
I pulled the plug on this monster and my ZHA network is now very stable again.
Well, due to the problems I now have ZHA and Z2M running parallel on a Home Assistant Green. Let’s see how this will work.