Ikea Tradfri Next Steps

[jameson_uk]

I currently have 21 Ikea GUI10 builds and a handful of switches. This has been working OK but the hub seems a bit pants and it has lead me to HA

The previous owner of the house seemed to love downlighters so every room has them and if I replace all the bulbs I would be looking at another 32 bulbs

I have setup HA Core and deCONZ and moved over two lights that aren’t really used and it seems to all work but I am just looking at where to go next.

AIUI the Ikea bulbs are a bit funny and don’t play that nicely in a Zigbee mesh. Currently the only Zigbee stuff I have is the IKEA lights and a Hue Go with a few IKEA switches but I have been looking at Zigbee temperature sensors, some switches to replace the existing room light switches and possibly some others.

How should I approach this? I saw somewhere suggesting that creating separate Zigbee meshes for lights and everything else might be better (But might this cause more issues than it solves?)

Also in terms of numbers of bulbs would that number cause problems regardless?

Finally any advice on how to set this all up? Should I group all the bulbs into rooms in deCONZ and then have everything in HA or should I only have the bulbs or rooms in HA and assign them to rooms there?

[jameson_uk]

no one?
Has anyone get lots of ikea bulbs setup and are there any issues?

[samnewman86]

I have many IKEA bulbs using deconz. They have worked flawlessly for 2-3 years so far.
Move them all across to deconz and ditch the IKEA hub. The more bulbs you have connected, the stronger the mesh will become.

[jameson_uk]

@code-in-progress

There have been instances where some Ikea devices tend to destroy a mesh (very well documented), so I have been steadily removing them and replacing them with better devices

@code-in-progress

If you are using ONLY Ikea and/or Hue devices, you’ll be fine with HA and any of the Zigbee controllers (ZHA, deconz, zigbee2mqtt) as you would be running an entire Zigbee3.0/ZLL profile mesh. If you start putting in other devices that are ZHA profile devices (anything from Sengled, Aeotec, and most other Zigbee manufacturers), that’s when you might start running into issues. ZHA and ZLL profiles can work together, but some manufacturers (namely Ikea and Hue) decided to forge their own path in the Zigbee spec and do some weird things with messaging between the two profiles that causes headaches.

are from another thread and was part of the reason for this post.

Do you have anything other than IKEA bulbs on your zigbee mesh?
I have actually just switched to Zigbee2MQTT as I was having issues with a Zigbee switch that works in Zigbee2MQTT but doesn’t play too nicely with deCONZ (turns off after 2 minutes which isn’t ideal)

[code-in-progress (Bill - I write code.)]

@jameson_uk

Do you have anything other than IKEA bulbs on your zigbee mesh?

I do. I have a smattering of all sorts of different brands and devices. BUT, I’m slowly removing the Ikea devices as they are just way too chatty and cause some other devices to miss messages.

One thing I have seen people do in the past is to take the ZLL devices (Ikea, Hue, Cree, etc) and put them on their own, separate mesh using a second controller. What I did in the past was to keep my Hue and Ikea devices on my Hue hub. But, I’ve since gotten rid of that setup in lieu of just running everything with a good controller (CC2652P2) and some really strong routers.