Pretty new to all of the amazing possibilities of Home Assistant but loving it thusfar! I only have one big issue at the moment. So my home situation is that we have our home and our office, which is approx. 20 metres (65 feet) away (garden in between). I have my HA Green inside the office, positioned closest to the main building. When I am in the main building, my Ikea remote control works half of the time and a smart plug is not recognized (too far I think). Do you guys have any idea how to cross this distance? Have some cool ideas lined up to have a trigger in the office and do something in the main building so would really like it to work steadily.
Zigbee per se won’t bridge an outdoor gap like that without a lot of heartache. You need to try something else.
Edit: Can’t find it now, but someone elsewhere solved a similar problem by installing a Hue hub in the remote building. The hub connected with HA via wi-fi. You’d only be able to run Hue devices, of course.
In any event, that’s the sort of solution you need to look at.
what kind of wires do you have between the two building?
Are you using WiFi between two buildings?
A bit ‘Hill Billy Tech’ and would just be an experiment, however you could get 2 of the Sonoff USB Dongle P’s (P type is important). Flash them with the Zigbee router firmware, increase each devices transmission power to 5 dBm, and perhaps add a higher performance (perhaps directional) SMA antenna to each. Then place them as close to windows or in attic in each building with long USB extension cable. Then make sure you add your devices in each building using the ‘Add via’ feature of Zigbee. As long as you have ‘reasonable line of sight’ 100 feet should be within the range of a pair of zigbee routers.
Unfortunately there is no Zigbee ‘tunneling’ software that I know of. So in 1 and 2 above, you would need to have two separate Zigbee network ‘bridged’ by Home Assistant with a Zibee coordinator for one network in each building.
Suggest that you check out all the many related tips and suggestions in this other thread explaining best practices and advising on best practice for extending range and coverage:
