I’m pretty new to the whole HA and Zigbee Ecosystem.
I’m facing following issue:
In Zigbee2Mqtt, basically all my zigbee devices show an LQI of 0 (or barely above).
They are also extremely unresponsive. Very rarely i can get them to turn on or off, but most of the time they just timeout after 10 seconds.
I used to have a sonoff zigbee coordinator plugged in via USB and that worked fine. I now have moved my Homeassistant PC to the basemant and thus have plugged in the SLZB-06 via POE in the same location where the PC originally used to be.
To give some context, the closest zigbee devices are around 5 meters away from the coordinator without walls in between and yet they get an LQI of 0.
Is there any chance that i just got a defective coordinator?
Can i share some logs or configuration to help identifying what the issue is?
Did you re-pair the devices to the new coordinator when you set it up? if not I would suggest to do so to refresh them else just toggle them on an off directly to see if they show up in the list in a working state.
Yes. At first i tried with the “old zigbee devices” that were already paired.
Thinking that changing the coordinator might was too much, i actually did a clean install of HA (actually wiped the disk, so proper clean install).
Thus it definitely shouldn’t be any id mismatch or similar.
I’m still doubting whether my coordinator might just be bad? I plan on actually opening it and checking if perhaps the Antenna got disconnected internally. I just can’t explain why a Zigbee Router that has no walls in between and is sitting at 9 meters distance would have an LQI of 0-10.
I also find it weird that according to the slzb-06 documentation, it is supposed to show a green LED when Zigbee2Mqtt is connection, but that LED is never really on for me. But still, the communcation works (although very badly).
Edit:
Another thing i find very curious:
Why does the LQI change when i toggle the on/off state of these Zigbee smart switches? For instance 1 switch consistenly switches from 29 (on) to 20 (off). They are wired up so my understanding is that they should have a pretty “constant” LQI, contrary to battery devices that only occasionally report in?
Yes if the LED is not on as it should be and its not related to the current firmware installed then it’s an issue with the hardware of that one you have, you may be best to return it for replacement under warranty.
As for LQI changes it could be the change in the pathing through the mesh at the time if its constantly migrating between router nodes.
@TH3xR34P3R
Does the router actually “turn off” when i turn off the switch? I was under the assumption that even when turned off, the router functionality would still be on?
Edit: Would that even impact the device itself i turn off? If the router gets turned off, i can understand other Zigbee Devices having to go through other routes and changing the LQI, but the device itself i turned off shouldn’t be impacted in terms of routing and LQI, or is my thought process wrong?
For wall switches they usually require neutral or a neutral bypass to be able to be used as a router else they will be set as end devices.
For smart plugs and relay’s as long as they are connected to a powered on socket even in the off state they will still have the other functions enabled since you just toggle the connection in them to open and close the circuit to power on/off the device they are controlling.
In general as long as the overall mesh connection is stable then you should not have issues unless you have problem devices causing them affecting the rest, in your case its the coordinator that is the main issue here.
Yeah, that was my understanding of how that works as well. I have these zigbee smart switches:
There’s actually other variants, but i specifically wanted these with the neutral wire in order to keep them on as routers (and in testing i also noticed that they switch faster than the smaller version without neutral).
Do you think flashing a different firmware on my slzb-06 could mess up all the paired devices? I think it shouldn’t because the ID of the coordinator stays the same, but i’m too new in this to really know.
Flashing to an updated firmware version should be painless and is recommended when there are updates that may resolve issues and to apply security patches.
I currently use an Aqara T2 relay in the power socket that is downstairs in the common shared laundry room for my block that is powered by my unit, I have not had issues with it so far even when I needed to restore a snapshot of my HA instance to fix a log bug that came up in one of the updates.
I have a zigbee smart plug connected to the corner light that has a hue bulb just to act as an additional router point since its socket is the closest mid point to it being one level up and it lets me power cycle the bulb if I need to reconnect it to the mesh.
I see. So your range is pretty good even without many routers then?
Do you also have the slzb-06 coordinator?
I’m currently on the newest firmware, maybe i’ll downgrade. What Firmware do you currently have, if you also own the slzb-06?
Also, i just opened the coordinator and can see that the soldering on the antenna looks fine, so that definitily shouldn’t be the issue.
If it isn’t firmware related then maybe i really just got a bad model?
So most of the devices communicate through the mesh rather than the coordinator itself. Which is fine, but it’s not working stable enough for it be left like this sadly.
For example, if i toggle on/off a light pretty fast 10 times in a row, around 2/10 times it takes a few seconds to actually trigger.
So i’ve just downgraded the firmware to a version that i’ve read runs very stable and none of my zigbee devices have come online since. This has been 2 hours ago. I’ll wait for another while to see if the network magically sorts itself out, but i’m really thinking something has to be wrong with my coordinator.
