Home with 3 buildings

[LiQuid_cOOled]

@bjtallman

I was planning to have a Home Assistant Green in the house, with a Raspberry Pi 5 in both the garage and workshop (both ethernet wired) with all 3 having an Aeotec Z-Stick 10 Pro. I’m having trouble getting proper communication.

Just to be clear for folks reading this…Are you trying to run 3 instances of HA?

@stevemann

Not mesh. Wireless Access Points work better.

I agree, especially if you are not trying to extend your WiFi range. Mesh is ideal when ethernet is limited and uses a single wireless backhaul connection to extend your WiFi range. It can have bandwidth issues.

**Your mesh nodes may have Wireless Access Point mode

@stevemann

You can have only one Z-wave controller or Zigbee coordinator in a network.

This isn’t true, at least for ZigBee. I’d look into SMLIGHT ethernet coordinators if you can get them. The allow multiple coordinators, but as @stevemann highlighted, additional repeaters are the method I would suggest if there are signal issues. For exactly this reason

@stevemann

Preferably on a USB2 port and through a 1M extension cable. USB2 and the extension cable is because the data speed on a USB3 device generates RF harmonics right in the middle of the 2.4 GHz band that WiFi and Zigbee use.This increases the noise floor and reduces the range. (Z-Wave operated on lower frequency spectrum and are immune from the 2.4GHz interference).

A good ZigBee resource