Home Assistant is better than any commercial product. BUT, I should not be afraid to update. Most recent problem is with zigbee. Given the interface, it seems that maybe I should migrate, but there’s absolutely no details in the UI about migration or even why I may need to migrate. So now my zigbee devices are dead to mev until I can spend a few hours to research it. I don’t have a few hours for this.
It’s this sort of thing that absolutely, positively MUST be resolved, on every effing release, before this product will replace the commercial .
Yes, this is an INDUSTRY standard. Been around for over ten years. Widespread. The bit you call ‘commercial’.
A pox on the whole industry for not getting it right. YET. May the fleas of a thousand camels infest your armpits.
Of course there is the latest shiny new Thread/Matter INDUSTRY STANDARD, out in the wild for a whole year now, touted by heady sales folks as the best viable alternative. The post-Christmas trauma is just settling in, and the forums here are filling with issues, and the sales returns are in full swing.
Fully interoperable? Works right out of the box? Completely vendor transparent? Completely internetz independent? Plug and play?
Yeah/naah.
(Insider secret: the vendors deliberately designed it so it isn’t)
Vote with your wallet.
Imagine if automobiles worked the same way - there would be riots and killings I tell ya - yet we patiently hit the update button each and every time, hoping for the next cure, the next hit, the next high, the next feature. There are only two industries that call their end customers ‘users’ and do so with equal contempt - drug pushers, and computers, and both are not regulated. Read and weep.
Nobody is the least bit embarrassed. Business as usual.
Time for enforceable product recalls and fines to force change. Government, not industry Regulation. Repercussions. Responsibility.
Of course, you could ask for your money back. Oh wait…
If you want more stable, Don’t use Add-ons and Custom Integrations. Stick only with core functionality.
You will have stuff that is much more tested. Not perfect, but it gets a lot more consistent testing than the stuff from the hundreds of random software contributors.
Stop using their sh*t.
There’s no indication you must migrate, theres no info on any migration. So why do you think you need to migrate anything, and from what to what? All we can make out is that you have some problem with Zigbee, no clue what integration or version of anything.I’m running 67 Zigbee devices on ZHA. I have not had any issues for years, currently on HA version 2026.2.1 and installed every version including betas since then.
PS, any device running in 2.4Ghz, including wifi routers can break your Zigbee sh*t any time they like to, you don’t need to update HA for that. It could also be a battery running low in a Zigbee device if the device starts flooding the mesh because of it. Been there.
You still cross your fingers every time you see ZigBee mentioned in the release notes and sigh when you see a new thread here with that in the subject line, don’t you?
Hi Thomas, I can imagine that you are quite frustrated when your zigbee network goes down and you have a big part of the house relying on that to be controlled.
Your choice of ventilating here without any signs of coming to a solution only confirms my suspicions.
TBH: I find your choice of words quite harsh, mandatory, even being in the social category but again, if your housemates are pointing at you, I get it.
At the same time, you should only blame yourself if you don’t have a good backup/restore strategy, even more if you can only control your devices with HA.
I have no stress at all with every new release/any update of HA or an integration: I’m running HA virtualised and with every update I take a full backup. Even if my server dies, I have a second Proxmox instance, my backups are offloaded so my system is back up in a jiffy.
Regarding zigbee: my mesh is stable, only on a few occasions when a battery powered device falls off because I haven’t noticed that the battery is fully drained.
As always
not jumping immediately on updates, if it ain’t broken…
reading the release notes, look for/if any issues
already mentioned backups
applies in this case.
Keep in mind: this is a free product!
I’m so pleased with it that I have a subscription and VPE.
Of course KNX (which I also use) can be more hassle free but then again, at what price and just a very small part of possibilities compared to HA…
I hope for you that you get your system up and running very soon and with the right questions you will definitely get help here.
I was exhausted after a long week and absolutely was venting when my usual ability to turn off lights stopped working after I was already settled in bed. As mentioned before, I’ll research what happened when I’m ready for the undertaking and report back here. Maybe that’s today, maybe not.
Ultimately, the solution to unproven releases is to have release levels. I don’t want anything brand new, but there’s currently no way of just updating without reviewing the changes, every change. There are various ways to achieve this, the biggest example being the Windows insiders program. This type of approach works very well.
I’ve been a paid HA subscriber since day one and am using official hardware with built-in modules, nothing unusual or custom.
The Add-ons are custom software except maybe the ones in the ‘official’ list.
All Custom Integrations are custom.
Anything that loads thru HACS is custom.
Blueprints are custom.
(I’m saying every install probably has some custom stuff)
Ok, fixed it. I looked in the logs and saw warnings for ZHA. Took a screenshot of the warning and asked Copilot how to fix - see attached images from Copilot.
So, to try to turn this venting session into a potential improvement, here are things to consider:
When issues occur for a particular subsystem, make them visible and actionable from the context where the error is seen. For example, if the dashboard has unavailable items, give a path in the UI that a user can click through to get to the root cause.
When something is deprecated (or, obsoleted as it seems in this case), make it clear somewhere that it needs attention. I suspect that the issue at hand may have been a long time coming.
Before an update begins, perform checks on the system at hand to see if the update will break parts of the system, and enumerate the detected areas to allow the user to decide whether to continue or at least to know the reasons problems occur after the update. Keep this info in a historical updates view. These checks will need to be mandated as part of the interface for all add-ons.
Copilot’s example appears to be missing the ota: key found in the official documentation.
FWIW, the warning message you received, concerning deprecation, was first reported by users well over a year ago. For example:
Is this the first time you have received the deprecation warning?
For future reference, submit good ideas in the first post of your topic. The busy people who can implement good ideas may not have the time to read past the initial rant.
I lost all my Zigbee devices. Im guessing because of a 2026.1.2 upgrade but I cannot proof this. Nothing seems to help. This is pretty frustrating and not the first time this happens.
I tried to unplug, restart, reconfigure devices.
The Conbee III is listening but there is no reply from any device for some weird reason. Its not a busy channel or 2.4Ghz interference. That would be weird after a stable situation for weeks.
I cant wrap my head around it yet and that annoys me lol
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