I can have five Danfoss Ally TRVs, but not six. The last one never gets added correctly. And none of them seem to work properly

Configuration Zigbee
1

I’m running Home Assistant OS on a Raspberry Pi 3 with a Sonoff Zigbee 3 dongle, and all my devices are integrated through ZHA. I started adding Aqara sensors and IKEA outlets - no problem. Then I added one Danfoss Ally thermostat - no problem.

Then I bought five Danfoss Ally thermostats more, because I wanted one for every radiator. But I couldn’t add the last one - or I could, but it clearly wasn’t added correctly - I would lose contact with it. SO…

Problem 1: The last TRV never gets added correctly

For a while, I thought the problem was with the physical device. But then I tried adding them in a different order, and it seems like it’s always the last to get added, that doesn’t work. Here, for example, is a screenshot of my dashboard now:

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As you can see, Room 3 is currently reading “Unavailable”. It apparently became unavailable a few hours after adding it:

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If I delete one of the other ones AND this one, then add this one, this one will work. If I then add the last one, that will be the one to not work.

Problem 2: Many of the others actually don’t seem to work either

As you can see on the above screenshot, two of the thermostats are set to 5 degrees, while three are set to 35 degrees. Only - they’re not. On my tablet computer, I set all thermostats to 5 degrees half an hour before taking this screenshot on my laptop. It seems like they’re not communicating. The cards on my tablet computer now displays the dials turned all the way down, but the setpoint reads 35 degrees - so that indicates a problem with the card.

Questions

  • How many Danfoss Ally thermostats is it reasonable to control with Home Assistant?
  • Is it a known problem that controlling Danfoss Ally thermostats is shaky?
  • I really miss some diagnostics log. Isn’t there somewhere that I can see a detailed, low-level output of HA’s attempts to communicate with the thermostats? How does one go about troubleshooting the Zigbee protocol?
  • I don’t have a Danfoss Gateway, since I wanted HA to control them. If I end up buying one, will I still be able to control them from HA, e.g. turn them all the way down when someone opens a window?
  • Should I try switching to Zigbee2MQTT? Is it reasonable to expect that to work better than ZHA? Or are my efforts better spent elsewhere?
  • Under “Device Info”, all devices, Danfoss and Aqara alike, read “RSSI: Unknown” - why? Why isn’t the received signal strength communicated to Home Assistant from the Sonoff Zigbee dongle?
2

Since no one else have answered any of my questions, I will try to answer some of them myself :slight_smile:

  1. It seems that too few zigbee repeaters was the main reason for my problems. I installed two - one on each floor - and all thermostats are now working perfectly!

  2. With enough repeaters, it is apparently possible to have a lot of devices!

  3. I found out how to enable zigbee logging, and how to read the log.

  4. For the moment, it seems like I can achieve anything I want, automation-wise, without a gateway :slight_smile:

  5. The Sonoff dongle apparently just doesn’t output RSSI values. I guess I could just buy another dongle :man_shrugging:

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