TL;DR: Anyone see a problem with Nous smart plugs sometimes flooding the Zigbee network with messages and crowding out other devices until the smart plug is removed completely? Is there a way to automatically evict chatty devices?
Behaviorally, this looks like a match for Zigbee network instability / flooding with two Shelly Power Strip 4 Gen4 (Zigbee2MQTT + CC2652P7) - #32 by PhilippeP or Zigbee device flooding network with messages but the devices are not the same.
I have a largish Zigbee network (I think it is, anyway - 86 devices, 37 of which are also routers) with Z2M and have encountered an intermittent problem that I have narrowed down to one specific class of device, which is the Nous Zigbee smart plug, model A9Z. My Z2M config is pretty vanilla and I didn’t tweak anything out of the box other than enabling “last seen.”
I had 18 of thee in my Zigbee network, since initial results were very good and so I standardized on them for everything with a smart plug. Since implementing them, some of them have an odd behavior where, seemingly at random, they will start flooding out messages, at a rate of >3 messages per second, almost all of which are linkquality updates.
When this happens, a single device is sending about the same message traffic as the top half of devices in the rest of the network and the Zigbee network slows down and things like remote button presses or light bulb controls just get lost.
Once it happens, simply re-pairing the device doesn’t fix it. Removing it entirely (unplugging it and putting it on a shelf) for a couple of days does seem to fix it for a while, but the problem eventually manifests again on those same sockets, as soon as a couple of weeks or as long as a few months after reintroducing it. This happened on four of the Nous smart plugs I have. The rest have been fine since installation, so it seems like something physical with a subset of devices, but it’s hard to nail down.
I am in the process of moving off these and onto Shelly smart plugs, since I don’t want the Zigbee network to just fade out when one of these goes nuts, but they are nice devices otherwise and I’d like to reuse them or give them away if there’s some way to prevent them from going insane and randomly messing up the network, or to automatically kick them out if they do.