My ZigBee network is starting to crumble… (In this case it’s ConBee + Z2M)
I’ve got about 65 ZigBee units and the mesh is excellent. However as I’ve added the last ones, more and more weird things are starting to happen and I’m not getting a consistent erroneous behaviour.
If you’re running a trouble free network now, hos big is it? If you got more than one network, what solution did you make? At what size did you decide to split?
Curious if I should troubleshoot more or go for second network, so input would be appreciated.
I don’t know what a ConBee can support, device-wise.
I have two networks myself, because Xiaomi devices are very picky about which routers they work with. So all of my Xioami devices and a handful of well-working routers are on one network, and everything else is on the other.
Thanks,
I’ve have for the moment ruled out the ConBee II, since it should handle 100 devices fairly easy. I do have some Xiaomi/Aqara stuff that behaves a bit funny, but it’s mostly sorted out.
When you use a second Z2M, I guess you spin-up another instance?
Yes, exactly. I run it on a different host/computer/VM/Pi/whatever as well, though that isn’t required. But separation of the radios can help with reception. In my case, because there are only so many routers on the Xiaomi network, I wanted the radio as centrally located as possible, so it runs on a Pi4 in the middle of my house. For my “everything else” network, it runs on a server in my data closet.
The Conbee/Deconz solution does not scale well for large numbers of devices. For extremely large Zigbee networks (> 100 devices) I recommend the native ZHA integrations coupled with an EZSP configured for source routing. I’m using the new Sonoff USB Zigbee 3 dongle with ZHA. I have over 200 Zigbee devices and the mesh is very stable.