Hi, newbie to HA here. I have a HA Green with a sky connect stick. Ive connected a few devices via ZHA but can’t get MQTT to work, do I require another dongle to run alongside the sky connect stick. The error logs I’m receiving quote “socat not enabled” Any help would be very appreciated 
Socat not enabled isn’t an error, its disabled by default in your Z2M config and it’s fine.
You can’t use the same adapter to run ZHA and Z2M at the same time. If you really need ZHA and Z2M at the same time you’ll need a second zigbee stick dedicated to Z2M. I would recommend you the Sonoff version P (with the TI cc2652p chip), its cheap and known to be extremely reliable with z2m.
Seems you mixed up ZHA &Z2Mqtt. The latter requires mqtt, the former doesn’t.
If Z2Mqtt is what you were aiming for, remove the coordinator from ZHA then remove the ZHA integration. You’ll be free to set it up properly in Z2Mqtt once that’s done
So assuming I add the Sonoff stick, will I be able to get Z2MQTT working. Do I need to enable Socat in the config and how do I do this?
What’s the reason for attempting to run ZHA and Zigbee2MQTT concurrently?
Usually it’s one or other so I’m curious to know why both? Is it to compare the two?
I’m curious to be honest. I’ve been using Hubitat for a few years and just looking to branch out (no complaints
at all with Hubitat) I hear that many devices have more functionality with Z2MQTT but curious to understand the truth with my own testing…
You don’t need to enable socat if the adapter you’ll be using is physically connected to the machine running zigbee2mqtt (i.e with usb). Socat is only used when connecting a remote adapter to zigbee2mqtt over TCP.
In your log, the message about socat being disabled is not an error message. The information logged using the INFO log level is purely informative, its not an indication of an error. Everyone are seeing this message when booting zigbee2mqtt (see my log below).
The actual error messages are a few lines below, it’s the typical errors you’ll see when z2m tries to establish communication with an adapter that is busy (yours is because it’s already in use by ZHA).
If you want to run ZHA and Z2M simultaneously, the only option is to have 2 different adapters (creating 2 different zigbee networks).
The sonoff P is cheap and known to be working perferctly fine with z2m. There are other adapters you can choose, there is a recommended adapter list on the z2m website. The Sonoff P is also an interesting choice because it can be flashed with a router firmware so it can act as a router instead of coordinator. So if you end up only using ZHA or Z2M (and not both) you could use your skyconnect as your coordinator and flash the Sonoff P to use it as a router and connect it to your skyconnect to improve your mesh network. So at least the Sonoff stick will not be a paper weight if you choose to run only ZHA or only Z2M.