Hi,
I have been working in the field of smart building for a while, and to make the projects works perfectly with out issues i focused on zigbee for lights and security sensors and esp home to control a/c, motion sensors, liquid level sensors and other wifi things,
Now i have a new project but this time the building
Is a drug store consisting of 3floors, i have no problems with wifi becouse it’s easy to install access points in each floor, but the zigbee stuff i am not sure how to cover all the building, is there zigbee extender or something else to cover large areas?
Depending on the material that building is made of you could use something like this strategically placed and hidden behind some AC outlets. They work also as routers/repeaters. Though they are for 220V and I don’t know where your project is located at.
I live in a four storey brick and stone Victorian house. My zigbee gateway is in the top floor. I have lights on each floor which create the mesh. Low powered sensors, right down in the cellar work fine.
From my experience from previous projects, most of zigbee devices not work with mesh, rgb controller, dimmer switches, battery powered sensors not work with mesh and it’s only conncet to the main zegbee modual, and that the weak point of the home assistant no ability to add more than one zigbee getway
In my case, i use sonoff tasmotized bridge and tuya mini switches and sensors, switches works fine in mesh but the sensors, dimmers and rgb controller not work
Clearly, that’s not my experience. Once a sprinkling of mains powered devices are in place I have no issues with battery devices connecting to the mesh. I’ve got a random hotch potch of different brands and the only device I get an issue with is an ikea blind that will struggle to reconnect if someone turns off the light in that room.
Sorry your experience is not good, what brand of devices have you had trouble with?
Maybe the issue from zigbee getway, i use sonoff bridge with tasmota software, i faced issues with tuya mini dimmer, it works fine only if it near the getway, also tuya motion sensors not work in mesh, it loss connection or became unavailable if it installed more than 10m away from the getway, the switches works perfectly tuya mini type
Also be aware that the ZHA mesh isn’t as robust at repairing itself as zwave.
the mains powered devices usually can connect in that standard mesh model but whenever I connect a new non-mains device I try to have it paired with the closest mains device that will be in its final resting place because the mesh won’t try to repair itself.
you can choose which mains device to connect thru in the device configuration in the ZHA integration.
also not all zigbee light bulbs act as repeaters for the mesh. I know that Sengled bulbs don’t (or didn’t…not sure if that’s changed with the new ones).
Thank you for your informative reply, i noticed that but the issue is when the power goes out which it too common in my city the non main power device loose the connection for ever, by the way did you tried zigbee to mqtt instead of zha? Does it have the same issues?
I have very limited experience with zigbee2mqtt. I only tried it for a short time when it was first released on a small test network. But I decided to satick with ZHA at the time.
But I don’t know why zigbee2mqtt would be any better for the experience you are having. That all should be a function of the zigbee controller itself not the integration.
What kind of devices do this? Using Z2M here battery powered zigbee devices do always reconnect to their nodes after a main power loss (which is also not uncommon where I live).
I have a half dozen or so $6 tuya motion sensors. Most of them are connected to routers without issue. The two connected to the coordinator are because of proximity.
But, quality of components matter. Not all mains devices route well.
I have a few Sonoff ZBDongle-P units flashed with router firmware that most of the devices connect to. The boosted power and external antenna couldn’t hurt your situation.
Neither version of the Sonoff wifi bridge seems particularly well reviewed. I have to wonder about that part of the mix.
As for zigbee2mqtt, I doubt it would help the network issues in a standard single instance config, but you could run multiple instances if you really want a separate coordinator per floor.
I am not sure which one is better but In zha, all the data and the signature of the devices will be in home assistant and the getway or the codenator only conncet devices with HA, in ZigbeetoMqtt, data and siqniture will be in the getway itself, so if the getway get failure you will loss all the pairing data.
Not really as long as you backup database.db and devices.yaml whenever you have made changes to your zigbee netweork. Those 2 files ate located inside /usr/share/hassio/share/zigbee2mqtt.
