Question, where do I need to set new base folder for zigbee2MQTT in MQTT for
A. zigbee2MQTT to work
B. So Home Assistant can see it and work with
Any thoughts? Ideas ? Suggestions?
Background
Over the last 9 months I have been trying to get zigbee2MQTT reliable under Home Assistant.
Prior to Home Assistant I was running zigbee2MQTT and MQTT in dockers with Node Red as the primary automation engine. I did have Hubitat and Homey reporting into MQTT/Node Red.
Over Christmas setup Home Assistant in a VM so everything could be contained and also by running on a MacOS running an M1 it uses little energy and I can apply a lot of RAM and processor to it.
Since moving MQTT and zigbee2MQTT, along with NR under Home Assistant I have been unable to repeat the stability achieved with it running in Dockers.
Have gone through all the steps ensuring that zigbee2MQTT coordinator is running in a free channel, 11 and everything else is clear of it.
The first few installs of zigbee2MQTT ran up ok and reliable with good performance.
Over time performance would degrade to a point where I was re-pairing up to 8% of devices per day, about half just falling off the network the other half, showing recent connection, often within seconds, but were no longer reporting changed states or responding to commands, forcing another repair.
I have bought a Home Assistant Green and run zigbee2MQTT from that with a zigbee2MQTT proxy on the main Home Assistant.
Again stable for a while then degrading over time to a point unusable.
I have changed coordinators, two different so offs and two different smlights with no change to eventual degradation.
The Ethernet Poe smlight coordinators enabled the location of the antenna to an optimum location centrally in the house away from all electrical devices.
An odd thing I have noticed since using the Home Assistant zigbee2MQTT is that zigbee2MQTT devices Settings do not work.
Ie any change made to RETAIN, QOS, etc are automatically reset back before you have the opportunity to hit save.
I had to set Remain in zigbee2MQTT configuration.yaml to enable anything.
The only thing left to try now seems to be use a different base folder in MQTT to ensure complete separation from previous attempts.
I have now rebuilt zigbee2MQTT under Home Assistant 4 times from scratch.
I have reduced the number of devices from the original 120 (80/40 Router/End Devices) to a base level of 36/17 totalling 53 devices, 9 of which are ikea zigbee routers.
I’ll restore the rest once a stability is achieved.
I rebuilt it all again last week, now very quick at pairing the Routers followed by the battery devices but would really like to get this stabilised 