I currently use a Sonoff USB Coordinator, with ZHA.
I see all of the good press on the SLZB devices. As I contemplate moving to a higher performance Home Assistant, hosted on a VM, I decided to try one of the SLZB devices for the convenience of moving the VM from node to node (Proxmox cluster) without moving the USB coordinator.
I see YouTube videos of people showing 1 or 4 Zigbee devices on the SLZB with ZHA, and performance is great, stable and immediate.
I did my own test, with 5 devices on a SLZB-06Mg24U with ZHA, and saw the same performance, great, stable, and immediate response.
…So I put it in production…
I didn’t put all of my Zigbee devices on the coordinator, I started with 70 devices.
Immediately I saw slow performance, turning on lights takes 3 to 15 seconds.
Automations that turn on lights sometimes don’t take action until I’ve been in the room 3-15 seconds.
When I start or restart Home Assistant, it takes several minutes for all 70 devices to be online, and sometimes not all 70 come online. 3-5 remain offline.
EVERY night EVERY Zigbee device becomes unavailable in Home Assistant. This requires a reboot of the SLZB device, and a complete restart of Home Assistant each morning.
During the course of a typical day, a random Zigbee device (or several) will become unavailable. This also requires the aforementioned reboot of the SLZB device, and also Home Assistant.
So…
I’m asking for help. The AI assistants out there tell me to update firmware, and do some other basic things like changing channels, which I’ve tried, and they blame “network latency“ but I’ve not made any progress after a week of tinkering and suffering.
Certainly you guys have had a better experience than me.
Has anyone had success with 100+ Zigbee devices on one of these coordinators with ZHA?
How did you get to success?
Where can I begin to troubleshoot?
I suppose if I can’t make this work, I could buy a USB coordinator for each of the nodes of my Proxmox cluster. It would still be cheaper than the SLZB device, just not as convenient.
Thanks for the replies, guys.
I do have the SLZB device in a central location. It's in a location very close to where my USB donlge was mounted.
Tell me the method you're using to do this. I tried this as part of my initial troubleshooting, but don't know for sure that I've chosen correctly because I'm seeing conflicting information on this. I'm using the following in my config:
zha:
zigpy_config:
znp_config:
tx_power: 10
serial:
port: "socket://192.168.1.72:6638" # Use your actual SLZB IP
baudrate: 115200
Would you please tell me how you check the Zigbee traffic? I really expected better logging on the SLZB device. I'm not aware of the method for checking Zigbee traffic, but I will admit that ALL of my plugs are all power monitoring, as well as my in-wall switches and dimmers. I wonder If i need to develop some Zigbee quirk documents to reduce chattiness of the power monitoring pieces.
Is there a method for enabling extra information in the map? I would love a way to get more useful diagnostic information. Is there a way that the map can show overwhelmed repeaters, or low lqi?
If the transmit power is high, devices that are far from the coordinator (say 10m) will "hear" it as the loudest source from the local devices, therefore believe that is is really close, and will use it directly to transmit data. Problem is that the coordinator is actually far away and may not hear incoming messages; it is good at shouting, not good at hearing.
Z2M has an activity screen, don't know about ZHA. You can also use a specialized sniffer device and see the traffic in Wireshark.
I put together a dashboard with the lqi of all 70 devices. The lowest is 60.
I was able to use this to fine tune the tx power to 5, which gives me the best lqi scores. Again, the lowest is 60.
Seems like I might need to go back to the USB device from Sonoff until there’s a way to see errors or messages in logs.