I made the horrible descission to move all my lights to deconz. The idea was to have all my lights, which is mixed ikea, hue and other brands on one platform. What a bad experience. Ever since i did that nothing has been working properly. Switches only work half the time. Automations only turning on/off half the lights it should.
Just look at this example. My usual automation that turns off the lights outside at night only turned off some of the lights, yet it seems that Home Assistant thinks the light IS actually off, while deconz rightly thinks its on, which it is.
In Philips Hue and Ikea Hubs you normally define rooms (groups) and put the lights in these rooms. And then you associate the switches with the groups. In Zigbee world this means that when you turn a room on, one group message is sent.
Maybe you have som scenes with individual settings and then more messages are sent. But overall the number of zigbee messages queued up at the same time is reduced. And remember in a mesh network these messages are relayed by routers so that doubles or triples the traffic.
Home assistant groups are just logical groups and you can mix zigbee, zwave, RF etc devices into same group. But Home Assistant does not know which zigbee groups devices belong to so all it can do is send an individual message to each device.
By defining groups in deconz, these are presented as a single entity in Home Assistant. You can put these deconz groups in a Home Assistant group so you can turn on e.g. 10 zigbee lights in a zigbee group and 2 Tasmota switches in a single action. The result is that one message is sent to Deconz which sends a single turn on message on the network.
There are two things that makes this more robust. I already noted the huge reduction in virtually simultaneous traffic on the Zigbee network. The other is that even if there is a temporary poor mesh route to a single device, the probability that the individual device hears the group messages is high. I have occationally seen a light bulb that did not respond to on off but it worked when I turn the entire room on and off.
And in normal life 90 % of what we do is turning rooms or groups on and off
And finally for dimming, use this method… Never step increase or decrease a large number of zigbee devices.
Yes, I can confirm, controlling devices via deconz groups helps a lot. Especially the scenes are much more reliable than via HA.
But anyway. I’m every day facing the problem, that one or another bulb or switch is unavailable. Sometimes it’s more annoying, i.e. when the stairs bulb doesn’t switch on during the night or the ventilator switch doesn’t react, but we might have to live with it. Last but not least we’re talking about 2.4Ghz. WLAN, mobiles, microwaves and maybe the neighbours wlan and devices disturbing the mesh and we have no chance to handle that. The interesting thing is, that the hue hub was more reliable. But maybe we just haven’t noticed the interruptions.
One weak link I eliminated were smart plugs from Osram
I had 7 of them. On Philips hue they always appeared offline. And on Deconz I noticed that devices routed via them would not always work. I replaced them all 7 with Philips smartplugs and that improved the stability of the mesh.
I still suspect some older Ikea 1000 lumen bulbs are not as good at routing but Ikea finally released an update for them.
The four button Philips remote were often unstable in the beginning. They were even worse on Philips’ own hub than on Deconz. I gave Philips hell about it. After a year they finally released a firmware that made them stable.
So check out for weak links. Not all devices have good firmware.
Innr plugs are rock solid as well.
I replaced two Osrans in the living room and never had problems again. Thanks for the tip withe the philipps ones I will try them out.
Conbee II stick stopped working, If I plug it into a windows 10 pc it just keeps connecting and disconnecting, This started after updating the firmware in phoscon… Anyone else had this issue or know a fix?
Thanks
I would rather say that the integration in HA is broken. HA shows me several entities and devices as unavailable, but I can switch them via Phoscon. I can also access the entities via OpenHab.
I didn’t say it wasn’t an issue with the integration. I said that it was a different issue from the onw mentioned above. Please create a new github issue and post debug logs
Don’t agree with that. Had one innr SP120 and the two Xiaomi motion sensors connected always dropped out after a day or two.
Unplugged the innr switch, reconnected the sensors (now connected to a Feibit switch), the motion sensors are working reliable since weeks (again).
My experience regarding Xiaomi sensors and battery powered rocker switches: it is crucial to find the “correct” node. This might be a node even two floors above or below the end point device. If your Xiaomi end point devices drop out on a regular basis, look up to which end point device they are connected and show this behaviour. Turn off this device and reconnect your Xiaomi device. Iterate until you find the best end point device.
It’s so weird. I have the Conbee II stick with DeconZ in Home Assistant for a year now without 1 single issue, dropout or whatsoever.
I have 20+ Philips Hue Lights, 6 Ikea lights, 7 door sensors, 4 pirs and a couple of buttons from Xiaomi and also a couple of Philips Hue dimmer switches and a couple of Pirs.
I think that interference is a really big thing also. Zigbee works on the same frequency spectrum as your WiFi. Always move your Wifi router away from the Conbee stick, use a USB extension cord for the stick, even a powered USB hub would be a good idea.
i never had issues with wifi interference, no mather what channel i choose… the only thing i struggled for a long time were my xiaomi sensors, seems xiaomo, once they are paired to a repeater/router, they dont change anymore … so if you reallocate some smart switches, make sure, you unpair/pair again the xiaomi stuff , so they choose another router then
