I love Zigbee!

Hardware
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I just wanted to say how much I’ve enjoyed working with Zigbee devices lately. I started with mostly tuya products that use Wifi, with ESP32 or ESP8266 chips. I’ve flashed a lot of devices with ESPHome and Tasmota using tuya-convert. I’ve frequently needed to open up the devices and solder wires onto the TYWE3S modules, then flash them over serial. (For a Kogan smart kettle, and some power boards with 4 sockets.) I learned a lot and enjoyed it the first few times, but it got old really fast and started to become a huge pain. I also ended up ordering and testing a few products that I couldn’t get to work. (Recently an “Arlec Grid Connect Smart Plug”, which has gone into the drawer for spare parts.)

Now I’m looking at this box of 6 WiFi energy monitoring plugs that I ordered:

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They’ve been sitting here for a week now. I can’t be bothered getting started on it, because I don’t want to start flashing them all with tuya-convert, and then finding out that the firmware is too new so I’m going to have to spend an entire day opening them all up, soldering all the wires to the TYWE3S modules (if they even still have them!), and then flashing them all one by one over serial.

And even if it all goes smoothly, it’s a lot of manual work to set up the ESPHome configurations, compile and download the firmwares to my tuya-convert Raspberry Pi, etc.

On the other hand, Zigbee products work straight out of the box! And zigbee2mqtt has been amazing. I’ve got a bunch of switch modules, switches, buttons, motion sensors, and door/window sensors. All I need to do is put a battery and, click the “Permit Join” button in Zigbee2MQTT, then hold down a button on the device. Or sometimes it just joins automatically. Then it’s all done and ready to go in Home Assistant.

I’ve used an Electrolama zzh USB stick. It’s been working great, but I’m sure other Zigbee sticks are just as good. I’ve also have had a much better experience with Zigbee2MQTT compared to the built-in Zigbee integration. Zigbee2MQTT seems much more powerful and maybe supports a wider range of devices (I couldn’t get one of my switches to work properly until I switched to Zigbee2MQTT.)

I wish I knew this before getting started with home automation. WiFi products can be fun and easy to set up if you use the vendor apps, but once you get interested in ESPHome or Tasmota, it’s probably better to use off-the-shelf Zigbee products that don’t require any custom firmware.

Now I just need to find some good/cheap energy monitoring power plugs that use Zigbee instead of WiFi. I’ve been struggling to find some for Aus/NZ power sockets.

4 Likes
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As much as I agree with you on the merits of zigbee over flashing alternate firmware to wifi devices, you may still be better off using the wifi plug if you want accurate power monitoring. It seems the zigbee power monitoring smart plugs have a sampling time issue. Have a read of this topic:

https://community.home-assistant.io/t/zigbee-smart-plug-with-power-monitoring/263162

FYI: the Brilliant plugs are still tuya-convertable.

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I was the OP on that thread you linked, thanks!

For what it’s worth, I ended up buying a couple of Sengled Zigbee power-monitoring smart switches from Amazon (see the other thread.) I’m only testing with them now. The device I’m currently playing with cycles on and off internally when it’s powered on. On top of that I have it set to go on and off every 30-60 minutes. It seems to be recording both cycles pretty well.

It could be the resolution is as low as every 30 seconds, I can’t tell for sure without monitoring the thing that’s plugged into it on some other monitor, but it sure looks like it’s capturing changes often enough to give pretty good data:
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I interpret this as the switch coming on at around 6:20 PM, the device working a little harder (2.5W+) to get up to temperature, then cycling on and off to maintain temperature until the switch is turned off at around 6:50.

At this point I’m pretty happy with these devices, although admittedly it’s early in my testing. Of course if I already bought WiFi devices, I’d find a way to make them work before buying new Zigbee ones. But otherwise, I’m sticking with Zigbee whenever I can.

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That’s good news. Unfortunately it does not look like Sengled have made their smart switch available in Australia.

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Yes ZigBee is nice when everything works.
But if you installed a light in the ceiling or a switch in the wall and need to pair it again then all the fun is lost.

That means you need to either get your ZigBee controller close to the device or vice versa.

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That’s not how I did it.

I stupidly didn’t change the default zigbee2mqtt network key the first time I paired all my devices. So after buying a couple of new routers I worked my way out from where the coordinator is, pairing the routers then pairing all the devices in situ. Worked like a charm.

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I didn’t either but also missed the ramifications of not doing so… does that cause issues in some situations?

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Not performance issues. It’s just not secure. The zigbee2mqtt default key is known. So if you are connecting locks that allow access to your home it is best to generate your own key for security. Or theoretically anyone who knew what they were doing could let themselves in (probably easier to smash a window TBH).

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Oh ok, I kind of assumed it was randomly generated. Does it tell us in docs that it should be modified? If I know I have no neighbors close enough/or into smart home stuff I’m probably fine with the default, no? :grimacing:

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Yes. In the zigbee2mqtt docs that the addon points to in its docs: https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/how_tos/how_to_secure_network.html#change-zigbee-network-encryption-key

Yeah, that’s why I wasn’t in a hurry to change it. Still, better to be safe than sorry.

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Oh yes, there it is… luckily being able to set permit join to true made it pretty darn easy to move my stuff, so it shouldn’t be too bad…

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I recently flashed a Sonoff Zigbee Bridge device with Tasmota to replace a bulky, clunky, sometimes aggravating Xiaomi Aquara hub. The Sonoff device has better signal coverage, occupies less room, and integrates in all of about two seconds with Home Assistant. It’s been superb.

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There’s an open issue on z2m github to add a generated network key as default but obviously something needs to be changed in HA core(?). https://github.com/Koenkk/zigbee2mqtt/issues/8900