I’ve got 45 Ikea Matter over Thread devices, connected to a ZBT2. HA running “bare metal” on a mini PC.
I live in a 1200sqft bungalow, with the ZBT2 pretty much right in the middle.
I’ve got 14 Ikea plugs, which are evenly spread around the house. Most configured themselves as routers.
I’ve got 21 Ikea bulbs, in 5 rooms and the hallways. Some of the bulbs configured themselves as Routers.
I’m having trouble in one room. 4 plugs, 6 lights. There always seems to be one bulb offline. It could be any one of the 6.
Power-cycling the offline bulb generally brings it back online, but within a few hours a different bulb will go offline.
Since all the bulbs are on a single physical switch, I’ve tried power-cycling the whole room, and just taking a single bulb out with the power on. Makes no difference.
All the bulbs and plugs are showing at least two good (green in the visualisation) links to Routers, and are 2 or 3 “hops” from the ZBT2.
All the other rooms are very stable.
I’ve tried leaving the Apple TV (not joined to the HA Thread network, and no Thread devices connected) powered off, and have disconnected the TP Link Deco Mesh that’s in the room.
I’m wondering if adding a second Border Router, in the room, would help?
Maybe a PoE device? I’ve read that adding the Apple TV would not be a good idea.
I had a situation similar to this, but using Apple TBRs. I was getting frequent offline devices in two corners of the house farthest from the TBRs. I added TBRs and it helped a bit. However, the biggest improvement I made was moving to the beta Matter.js server. After moving to the beta, my network has changed dramatically for the best. It’s very reliable, and I find that I can run my 102 devices in a 3800 sf house with just one Apple TV. It’s probably worth a try and at this point the beta is very stable. Let me know if you want more info!
I’ve been using the beta version for a few weeks now. I’ve had far fewer dropouts since switching to beta, but still having problems with this one room.
I had one bulb drop offline overnight. A different one last night.
Looking at the history for each of the six bulbs in the room, five of them had zero dropouts in 24 hours, one had multiple short dropouts in the space of 2 hours, was then fine for 3 hours, then failed completely
Have you looked at the Thread mesh map in Matter.js to see if there are strong paths to the bulbs in that room?
If that room is uniquely far from your border router compared to the other rooms that don’t have issues, and you see only weak connections, it might be worth adding a router. I also have a lot of Eve smart plugs that carry the load between devices with weaker radios. You could try that too.
But if the room is as close to your border router as the other rooms and it has strong connections, you may want to post debug logs that someone more technical than I might be able to decipher.
All the bulbs and plugs have at least one “green” path to a router device, and 2 of the router plugs have “green” paths to at least one other router that’s got a “green” path to the Border Router.
The room is the furthest away from the Border Router, but it’s less than 15 feet from the closest plug in the room to the BR.
I’m wondering if the house construction is the problem. The internal walls are made from blockwork, but it’s 1960’s blockwork, not the modern lightweight stuff. When I’ve drilled holes for shelves etc., the dust is almost black. High mineral content? Maybe acting as an RF shield?
When I was using wifi smart devices, I needed a lot of mesh points to get a good signal. I’ve disconnected the Deco mesh devices close to the room in question just incase the wifi was swamping Thread
Might be walls. One of my problem rooms had marble tile walls. But the problem went away with the beta. But I also added a HomePod mini in the space above the room and it helps.
Another dumb thing to try: shut down HA host and your BR. If possible also cut power to all thread devices in that room. Start up HA and the BR and wait a few minutes to get going. Then power on devices.
I had weird connection issues the other day that a reboot of my Apple thread border routers and HA host took care of. In my case I did not have to reboot the devices.