Hey everyone,
I’ve been using Home Assistant for almost four years now, and it’s grown quite a bit over time.
I have a detached house and I control or monitor almost everything in every area: lights, heating, ventilation, multi-room audio, PV, charging station, doorbell, door opening, outdoor area, terrace, mobile devices including one as a dashboard…
Basically, I’m very satisfied, but I’ve been noticing a few things lately that make me wonder if it’s time for new hardware.
My system currently consists of a Raspberry Pi 4 (4 GB RAM) with an SSD and a CC2652.
The system, and especially the Zigbee antenna, is located in the utility room and therefore in a corner of the house (facing away from the garden). So anything but central.
The things that have been bothering me for a while are delays with Zigbee devices, as well as sometimes slow responses from my mobile devices.
At the heart of my considerations is whether I should use a new server and whether and how I can upgrade my Zigbee system.
Server
Everything I do with it is actually not very hardware-hungry, so I would think a Raspberry Pi 4 is enough. However, I see that it permanently uses a third of its RAM. I don’t actually think that the occasional slow response of the mobile devices is due to the server. But I still have an old PC lying around and if I’m going to turn the hardware upside down once, it would be stupid not to do it.
The PC I still have is a Pentium G3220 with 32 GB SSD. Of course, I’m also aware that the PC consumes significantly more power; more like 25-30 watts.
Zigbee
I currently have 67 Zigbee devices with almost 600 entities. With that, I’m almost at the end of my plans. That means a few more will probably come, but then that’s it. For about a year now, however, I’ve noticed that some things happen with a delay. For example, I have door sensors in the bathroom doors and additional PIRs in the rooms. This is used to control the lights and radio. On mainly via the door sensors; off via the PIRs. And every now and then there’s a delay. Mostly only 2, 3 seconds, but sometimes real “thinking time” of 15 seconds, for example… Also with the door opener, where a Zigbee in-wall module controls a dry-contact module and thus unlocks the door. I don’t know if that came at some point with a certain size of the Zigbee network or what else it’s due to. In any case, I think that the small CC2652 might not be the optimum in the long run, so I’ve taken a liking to the coordinators from SMLight.
After a bit of research, the plan was to place two of them in the house so that as much as possible and much better than now is covered.
Then again, I read posts from the Zigbee god Koenkk, who says you don’t need more than one, because the devices serve as relays. But I’m already observing a gradient of Zigbee devices towards the edge of the reception. Plus, I imagine that a relay also takes time → so delay…
Long introduction, now finally my questions:
Would you advise me to replace the Raspberry Pi 4 with the PC mentioned above?
Should I use a Zigbee setup with one stick or two in the future?
Are there alternative ways to optimize Zigbee reception? I’ve heard something about an active Zigbee router?
If I use two SMLights, how does that work then? Each stick builds its own network and each device is then only connected to one of the two networks, right? And the threads then come together within HA.
I wrote above how extensive my system is now. Accordingly, there are many automations, names, etc. to port. How would you approach that?
It’s become a lot, but I have big plans and would like to benefit from your experience.
Best regards
Rico