Looking for suggestions on the right way to bridge between two buildings

Trying to decide between a few options here and looking for advice before I buy a bunch of hardware.

I have two buildings on my property, house and a detached garage. The garage has a renovated 1brm apartment on the 2nd floor, and I’m currently using that as my work from home office. When the pandemic is over I’ll probably rent it out, most likely airbnb it–like, a year from now, but that’s a useful bit of information for this decision. For now it’s my office.

The buildings are pretty far apart, like, 100 feet. I have good WIFI coverage in both though–I have a WIFI mesh with the router in the house sitting next to a window line of sight to a WIFI satellite in a window in the garage. One day I’d like to do that with antennae on the roof or something, but for that works well enough. This is an Orbi setup so it’s using a 5g backhaul across that gap, the point there being most of my WIFI devices should be 5g. I have the 2.4g network relegated to channel 11 so that channel 1 is pretty freed up for zigbee. My neighbour’s have WIFI but they are pretty far–I see them at -80db in WIFI analyzers.

However it’s been a stretch to get zigbee connectivity between the buildings. Devices in the house have all formed a pretty well connected zigbee network, with HA/deconz/conbee as the controller, but it’s spotty getting connectivity across to the garage apartment through zigbee. Currently, I’m relying on things like lights to relay the signal though, which I understand is hit and miss (they are mostly home depot ecosmart zigbee lights).

As I see it, I have a few different options here:

  1. Buy some zigbee repeaters, or install some well-places zigbee wall sockets to act as repeaters, to help the network bridge the gap between the buildings. Maybe even upgrade some of the outdoor sockets to be zigbee just so that they are on the outside of the building and see each other. I am sure with enough well-placed devices I’d eventually find a way to mesh across the gap just like WIFI does.

  2. Use only WIFI enabled devices in the garage, since WIFI signal is good there. That would work really well for lights, it’s going to limit me if I want to use other kinds of sensors, that are mostly zigbee devices. But this is an option, 90% of what I want to do is lighting anyway so maybe just WIFI lights there. However I’d like to keep this LOCAL CONTROL (whole idea of HA you know) and most WIFI lights either want to call a cloud service, or else they need some additional fancy hub I’d need to buy.

  3. Set up two completely separate HA instances, one for the garage, and one for the house. Buy a PI and another conbee and just replicate the whole setup. Create automations that are mostly separate between the two buildings but for a handful of automations (all lights out, outdoor lights on) figure out a way to get one HA to talk to the other–I imagine I can have one make a REST call of some kind to the other as an action that triggers a further action?

Anyway, looking forward for some discussion of this. I don’t want to go out and buy a whole bunch of zigbee repeaters just to find out it never really works well, or replicate the whole HA/deconz/conbee setup only to find out the cross-building automations are difficult/broken.

I would go with option 3.

That way you don’t mess up your tennant when you reset your home device.
Assumes that a garage apartment needs only a simple setup compared to your home.
Will cost a few bucks.

#3

You can use HA API to make bldg 2 visible in UI of bldg 1 HA instance.

I prefer api as it gives more control over how the entities ate added into to receiving HA instanced vs the MQTT methods (statestream/eventstream)

What about having multiple Zigbee networks with a single HA controller?

Have a PC (or Pi or whatever) that’s connected to your LAN via WiFi in the garage, and put a Zigbee stick in it… that will make a mesh in your garage and control all the devices in the garage. Leave your existing Zigbee stick in your house with your HA box and let that control all the devices in your house. HA could then talk to both Zigbee meshes via different integrations.

Since (to my knowledge) you can’t have multiple coordinators/meshes in the ZHA integration, the second ConBee in the garage would need to use the deCONZ integration if that’s possible. If not, then you might need a different brand of Zigbee coordinator for the garage with a different HA integration.

Interesting. So right now I have HA/deconz/conbee on a NUC in the home. You are suggesting I create a hub in the garage and integrate it with HA.

I guess I’m a bit lost on how to do that, I installed deconz the easy way (HA supervisor add-on store) but I guess in theory I could set up a Zigbee hub on a pi, or, just buy some other hub and integrate it into HA.

I don’t know this stuff well enough to want to be a ground breaker, is there a relatively straight forward way to do this where I would be following in the footsteps of others? Some local hub seems like a good solution.

If you just want to get network from the main building to the outbuilding, and there isn’t a conduit to run CAT5/CAT6 through, then 100 feet is trivial for WiFi bridges.

I use ENS500-AC WiFi bridges extensively on customer sites to bridge between buildings (primarily for IP security cameras).

Could you setup a SmartThings (or similar) hub out in the ‘office’ to handle the ZWave / Zigbee out there?

Personally - I started w/ SmartThings and rather than decouple and repair everything to HA’s NUC - I just left the SmartThings hub and integrated that - works pretty well and w/ the right controllers, can all still be local control.

I could. SmartThings in particular would require me to open up my network to push notifications from the cloud, I’d prefer something that I can interact with locally.

Essentially, yeah.

What got me thinking about something like this was: I recently disconnected my ConBee from my HA box (powered it down first), and then connected the ConBee to my PC, where I could run deCONZ to check the firmware revision, mess with the channel, etc. When I was done, I put the ConBee back into my HA box, started it up, and it auto-detected a new “device” - the Phoscon App running on my PC… which I hadn’t shut down yet. I think that if I had a second ConBee connected to my PC, I could have it create a Zigbee mesh of its own and then have HA detect devices through the Phoscon integration. USPS lost the package with my second ConBee in it last week, so I haven’t been able to try it yet. But I’ll try it out whenever I eventually get a replacement.

So if that does indeed work, what you could do is install deCONZ/Phoscon in some always-on PC/Pi/etc. in your garage-office, and have that PC/Pi/etc. connected to your LAN over WiFi. That LAN connection would let HA communicate with a ConBee in the garage-office, and the ConBee in the garage-office would talk to all the Zigbee devices in your garage-office and not need to communicate with, or even know about, any Zigbee devices in your home.

In theory. I think. :wink:

Theory confirmed… got a second ConBee II today and popped it into my Win10 PC. I installed deCONZ on the PC, configured the ConBee on an unoccupied channel, and then paired a spare Zigbee lightbulb to it. I then installed the deCONZ integration in HA (running on my Ubuntu box) and it detected the deCONZ instance running on my Win10 PC. I now have a device/entity in HA for the new lightbulb and it seems to operate properly.

So on first glance, it appears you can have ZHA running a local ConBee stick in HA and then have a second ConBee II elsewhere on your LAN for a second (independent) Zigbee network. This should allow one to have multiple Zigbee networks spread over an area where Zigbee devices won’t reliably communicate, provide you have a LAN (wired or WiFi) connection between two zones with independent Zigbee networks.

And for anyone not reading my posts above, my HA setup already has a ConBee II stick in a USB port on the Ubuntu box and that’s integrated into HA with the ZHA integration.

So did you need to get a second HA instance running in the Garage to run deCONZ or did you run deCONZ natively on ubuntu some way?

You have a VERY similar need as I do. We live on a small ranch and the office/shop is about 790ft (240m) from the house. I finally connected them with fiber so I have a 1GB connection between the two. and need to get the HA instance in the house talking to a Zigbee net in the barn.

BTW, for about two years before I dug the trench and put in fiber I used a pair of Ubiquiti NanoBeam M-19 5GHz links in a Point to Point connection. Even in heavy rain I never lost the connection in case any one else has need for long range link. They were very reasonably priced. I am currently reconfiguring them to connect to the main entrance gate since it is also too far for Ethernet.

TL;DR: I didn’t need a second HA instance, just a separate deCONZ instance.

More details… at the time I wrote the above post, this is how I had things configured.

ZigbeeNetwork1:

  • Ubuntu18 host with ConBeeII stick, running Supervised Home Assistant
  • ConBeeII configured with ZHA integration and ~100 devices
  • All devices work in HA properly

ZigbeeNetwork2:

  • Windows10 PC with another ConBeeII stick, running deCONZ software
  • I have this second Zigbee network on a different Zigbee channel because the physical locations of the devices in the two networks overlap. If the networks were physically farther apart, I think you’d be able to use the same channel on both Zigbee networks if you wanted to.
  • Both Win10 PC and my Ubuntu host running HA are on my private (Ethernet) network on the same subnet
  • deCONZ instance on Win10PC was automatically detected by HA, named with the Win10PC’s IP address
  • All (~25) devices connected to Network2 are also detected properly by HA and have full functionality

ZigbeeNetwork1 and ZigbeeNetwork2 could be in the same physical loction or very different locations, as long as the hosts where their (ConBeeII) controllers reside are on the same IP (Ethernet/WiFi) network.

Since that time, I have migrated my HA instance to a dedicated Intel NUC running the dedicated HA image. I have also migrated my second Zigbee network to my Win7 PC, as that’s my DVR that’s on 24/7 and I didn’t want to keep my main Win10 PC on 24/7. This new setup works great as well.

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It would be interesting to experiment with whether one could run the deCONZ software directly on the Ubuntu host that supervises HA or whether you could create a second ZHA instance within HA by installing a second ConBeeII on the HA host.

Or even run one ConBee with ZHA and one with deCONZ directly on the HA host.

If that’s possible then you could also look into using USB-over-IP adapters to put just the second ConBeeII stick in the remote location, eliminating the need for a second PC as I have right now. I have lots of Cat6 wiring run all over my house, so I find these USB-over-Cat5e adapters to be useful for placing USB devices in locations where I don’t want compute hardware. They work great for both of my ConBee sticks, and allow more optimal antenna placement.

When I eventually have to give up my aging Win7 MediaCenter PC that’s my DVR, I may look into trying to get dual Zigbee networks to coexist peacefully on a single HA instance without deCONZ running on some other host.