I’m planning to add several Aqara buttons and sensors in my house. Because the house is big, I’ll need to extend the zigbee signal. I’ve read that Aqara smart plugs will also extend the signal, so I can place 2 or 3 to do it. But I rather would like to use Gateways instead of plugs to extend the signal, because they have light and a speaker, and it’s more useful.
So, my question: Can I use several Gateways to extend the signal, so I can use, for example, a button anywhere in my house, moving it through different Gateways? Or will a button be paired to only one gateway?
If I understand zigbee correctly, multiple gateways will increase the signal strength throughout the mesh.
While you will “pair” the button with one gateway, it will be usable anywhere there is zigbee signal in the house. From a usability perspective it would seem to roam like wifi between gateways, but it will still be paired or activated against just the original one.
For me using multiple gateways has not increased the range of one specific gateways, so I have to connect sensors to the closest gateway and then set up automation for arming and disarming 3 gateways together. However I am using three different gateways (speaker, camera, and AC companion gateways) also I haven’t used the zigbee power socket. I have found that the gateway tend to hang every now and then and require a restart or time to fix themselves.
Each gateway is a separate zigbee network.
I have distributed each gateway and sensors accordingly, at the moment i have around 20 or so devices on each.
The zigbee powered sockets do increase the range but only for the zigbee network (gateway) it is attached to.
Also remember each gateway has a limit of 30 devices attached to them
One thing to check is that that as both 2.4g wifi and zigbee use the same frequency they can affect each other
I had to reassign my wifi channel to be at channel 1 so that it limited the interferenece between it and the zigbee gateways
Take a look at the following links and these explain the wifi/zigbee overlap and also how to find what channel the gateway is running on.
quite stupid of xiaomi to create separate zigbee networks instead of joining them together… I also was under the impression that I would just extend the reach of my network but unfortunately that is not the case. I guess I should have tried to find this topic before buying the 2nd gateway… I guess I will move my 1st gateway to a more central location, remove sensors that are farther away than from the 2nd gateway (and are unavailable most of the time) and reconnect them to the 2nd gateway… stupid stupid xiaomi
I bought yeelight lamp that needs BT gateway. I allready have gateway version 2, which does not have BT, it has only WIFI. Is it possible to have both Xiaomi gateways? Could i still combine other wifi lamps with this one on the app? I am thinking about the presets/scenarios.
