I use zigbee2mqtt with a selection of mostly Aqara sensors. I added an Ikea repeater as some sensors were out of range. This was really easy, I just plugged in the repeater, made sure that it was added to zigbee2mqtt and the sensors connected through the repeater.
The ikea repeaters are now out of stock so I bought a couple of sonoff smart plugs (I don’t need to use the plug but these where the cheapest powered zigbee accessory I could find). I have added one of them to my zigbee network and on the map it appears as a router. Nothing has attached to it though. Do I need to do something special to get devices to pair with it rather than my coordinator? (I didn’t with the Ikea repeater).
The sonoff plug is in my bedroom and I have some zigbee devices in the bedroom that do not connect through it and have a low linkquality. There is one device the other side of a partition wall that has connection to anything!
Aqara sensors tend to stick to the router that they were initially paired with and don’t update their mesh. Try removing a sensor from z2m that is near the new plugs and re-pairing it and see if it joins to the plug.
You can also force this by only having that plug in pairing mode (the little arrow next to ‘Permit Join (All)’
Been through similar recently. Decided I would add Zigbee to my system. Bought 3 sonoff door sensors 2 dongles and 3 plug sockets.
When pairing none of them would pair in the place they were going to live, so all were paired locally, then positioned. the network worked sometimes but then after a few hours things would drop off the network. I spent hours if not days trying to get things to talk like they should, repairing etc. no luck at all, and I was thinking this Zigbee stuff is rubbish wish I had stuck with WiFi.
Then I read somewhere that if you just switch the Zigbee off for 30 minutes and then switch it back on it will reconnect everything. I did this and all the links worked as expected with links between routers and dongles as they should be. Its now been rock solid for 4 weeks.