I am showing this. For some reason, some of these do work and some do not. My home is a single wide mobile home, with three bedrooms, about nine hundred square feet or so. The walls are strong but made of wood. The outer walls are a combination of metal and wood.
In the graphic, the top part is a not-to-scale layout of our home. The bottom part is the Zigbee2MQTT Map. On the map, you can see that the kitchen, living room, and offices work fine most of the time. It is the hallway near the bathrooms and bedrooms that are unreachable.
Smartthings runs the bathrooms and my wife’s office (Serenity). There are about fifteen devices on it, and I will keep it that way until I am able to stabilize the rooms that I am working on now. Right now, it is my office (Antonio), living room, hallways, outside lights, and master bedroom. As you can see on the map, there are a few Zigbee devices that are not always connected probably because it is far away. So, I bought a bunch of Sonof plugs that I use mostly for night lights.
This has improved the network tremendously. When I switched to Home Assistant about four weeks ago, I mostly had Sengled Zigbee bulbs. It will be costly to try and replace all of them from Sengled end-devices to a router bulb. I thought Sonof would be enough.
If you look at the map, there are about six Sonof plugs, and some are connecting. I wish I knew how to connect, or force connect because as you can see, there is PLENTY of room for the Sonof device to connect the remaining devices. Any ideas? Should I get another Sonof coordinator and flash it to a router? Eventually I will replace all my bulbs with router bulbs, but that is going to take time. I know HUE is rated the best as far as reliability is concerned, but it is also expensive.
I currently have over 69 Zigbee devices in Zigbee2MQTT. The Smartthings is working great now because there are only 15 devices. I have that connected to HA as well, so I can run automations in HA. I would like to remove ST with HA completely once I figure out how to really make a reliable smart home.
Second question: My wife and I are planning to move from Texas to Tucson, AZ. Want to buy an acre or two and drop a double-wide in the middle of it. I do plan on expanding the smart home to include yard lights and so much more. I believe the limit is 128 devices. Would I need SmartThings or something similar or could I connect a second Zigbee cordinator to HA? In a single wide mobile home, I have 69 devices. Can you imagine a sub-luxury double wide where I plan on really taking things to new heights. What is the best way to really expand the network? Do I really need to cut my home in half (Virtually)? Can HA really operate as HOME and SLAVE together? What are some options for this? Thanks in advance!