Hello,
I’m ready to buy some stuff for my new house.
I’m planning to go with:
Sonoff SNZB-02P (temperature and humidity. Seem better than the Aqara I initially found)
Sonoff MINI-D (for ch demand of hydro module)
Sonoff 4ch Pro3 (for thermal actuators for underfloor heating)
Some Shelly dimmer 3 for managing my Dali LEDs
Some Shelly 1gen4 for managing my outdoor lights
Questions:
is Sonoff well supported? Or is it better if I go full Shelly?
while the wifi sensors are super easy to setup, the zigbee ones require an adapter. I’m currently hosting a HAOS VM in proxmox. Can I just connect the ZBT-1 adapter to my HAOS VM or do I still need the zigbee coordinator/router/whatever from, for example, Sonoff?
You can plug in the ZBT-1 directly to your host machine and pass it through to the VM then either set it up with ZHA or Z2MQTT.
Most of you devices should work out of the box and you should be able to just organise them and setup your automations once added to your HA instance.
Also make sure you have a few router based devices peppered about in the setup so that you have a strong mesh, a few generic smart plugs or more of the relays that act as routers will fill that role.
Sonoff works really well in my experience, i use them with Zigbee2Mqtt and Sonoff Zbdongle-e.
Sensors are great, but you might need to click them when reconfiguration is needed, and this wasnt mentioned in manual.
I have one aqara and one sonoff Zbmini switch. The latter needed fw upgrade and it was bit more troublesome at first (some features returned errors). Also i use three Sonoff TRVZB and again works great.
Have you used Zigbee before? From your post, I’d guess not. Do read up on it before you buy anything.
Zigbee is completely different from wi-fi - you have to have a lot of mains-powered router devices before the sensors will work reliably. Outside installations are problematic for this reason.
Older Sonoff Zigbee devices could be a little flaky, but the current stuff is pretty good.
However, I will repeat the concern raised by others… just using the ZBT-1 coordinator is not going to be sufficient. You need a significant number of router devices for a robust and reliable mesh. Having a weak mesh will cause your sensors to drop out randomly, often requiring your to manually re-pair them; and they may also use up their batteries much more quickly than expected.
There are a number of introductory articles about Zigbee available in the Community Cookbook Index.
Thank you everyone! I really learned a lot today.
Zigbee is way more involved than I anticipated and, looking at the above link, it also wouldn’t seem the best choice for me.
Unfortunately, all good temperature sensors are zigbee only, so I have to find a way to make it work with my setup.
Those sensors would be the only zigbee devices in my home (2 floors, 100sqm per floor), so I would definitely need some routers (2 enough?) placed centrally (or not?) on each floor.
It will depend entirely on the layout and structure of your home, but it is the density of the mesh that counts, not distance. The signal is very weak (by design, to make small battery-powered sensors viable) and messages bounce around between routers to find their way past interference and obstacles. Sensors are not part of the mesh. They use it to communicate with the coordinator, but only mains-powered devices (lights, sockets etc.) can provide connections.
Your network will grow. It’s part of the addiction. I have 44 Zigbee devices in my home (2400 Square Ft. on 3 levels). I have 14 of these scattered about the house so that no end device is more than 3M from a router. A very robust Zigbee network.
Zigbee and WiFi share the same frequency band (2.4GHz) but they are quite compatible. In addition to my 44 Zigbee devices, I also have 64 WiFi devices, 8 of them are WiFi cameras. Don’t let anyone tell you that they don’t work together well. The reason you need many routers (almost all mains powered devices are also routers) is because Zigbee is low-power (compared to WiFi). It’s not unlike trying to hold a conversation with someone during a football game. When a goal scores, you need someone between you and the person you are conversing with to repeat what was said. That is what all the routers do.
Don’t be afraid of zigbee, I started with only the nabu skyconnect and some ikea motion sensors, then added some ikea smart plugs and air sensors and it all has been fine.
Of course location, building construction, and outside interference (neighbors etc) could affect it, but adding more zigbee plugs to fill out the mesh should help.
To me one of the best things about zigbee is that it is not reliant on wifi, you don’t have to worry about ip addresses or hostnames or wifi location, etc.
thanks for sharing your setup, that’s really useful for a newbie like me.
The other smart things (in addition to what I wrote above) in my house will be:
3x shelly dimmer gen3 dali
4x shelly 1gen4 (will be used for managing the outside lights so that when cameras detect movement lights will go on, so a bit useless for my need of “zigbee repeaters”)
For now I don’t have anything else in mind, but I still don’t live there so I’m just doing some planning
I think I’ll start with 2x Aeotec Range Extender Zi: 1 on ground floor with 2 zigbee devices ~3mt from it and 1 on first floor with 6 zigbee devices ~5mt from it.
I’ll then check if the signal is good and stable (how?). If not, I’ll buy more
Once your device(s) are integrated into home assistant, in the device details, usually in the ‘diagnostics’ section, is the RSSI/LQI etc of wireless devices. I think most are disabled and/or hidden by default, but it is simple to enable/unhide them if you want them available.
So, money is no object?
For the price of one Aeotec “extender”, you can get four Zigbee plugs that do the same thing. “Extender” is just a marketing term. They are routers. The range (distance) are calculated based on a complex formula using ERP, antenna gain, fresnel intrusion, receiver sensitivity (also calculated, not measured). In the real world you can usually expect half or less.
You don’t want Home Assistant to control the lights??
To recap- you NEVER need the manufacturers hub/controller/router/extender.
You NEVER need a cloud app to control your Zigbee devices.
I use Sonoff Dongle-Ps flashed with router software. Started out with three or four of those as the only router devices with 20 or so end devices and they were good for the whole house.
Many, many devices later (100+) and a lot more router devices, but 90% of the net still connects through the Sonoff sticks.
Zigbee certainly has a heavy requirement for many devices. I have 4 rooms in a square (maximum distance between any two devices is about 8 metres) and with 9 routers I still have unreliable devices, dropped messages and messages delivered in the wrong order (e.g. door closed before it is opened). In my opinion, Zigbee is not something you mix in with other stuff, it’s what you use if you want a monoculture of one connection type AND want to replace each and every light switch and outlet with a zigbee one.
In my experience, Shelly on wifi is the most stable, reliable, and least issue-prone solution. That stuff just works and I have never had even the slightest issue with connection or functionality. Even ESPHome/wifi devices have a worse record.
Size is not the point. You’re after mesh coverage, which will be different in every home. For example, it’s counter-intuitive, but small rooms often require more routers than large ones, because the are more obstructing walls.
Well, I don’t want to waste my money, but I’m also a fan of “buy once, cry once”.
I liked the aeotec router because it’s small and can be strategically hidden. While smart plugs are useful, I wouldn’t have many use cases for them, at least not right now.
Yes, HA will be managing the Shelly that are connected to the external lights. What I meant is that those Shelly are on the external part of the wall, so they are not useful as zigbee routers because they’ll be far from the others sensors.
