I’m running Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi 5 with a memory card, configured with the ZHA integration. My Zigbee coordinator is a Sonoff Zigbee 3.0 USB Dongle Plus v2, and I have 39 devices connected to it, including 10 routers spread across different rooms. The coordinator is placed away from any interference sources, and the apartment is about 100 square meters with mostly brick walls.
The issue I’m facing is with low LQI values across the network, even though most devices are quite close to each other. Additionally, there are noticeable delays in many of my automations. My automations are organized into scenes triggered by Zigbee buttons and standard Zigbee switches.
During troubleshooting, I observed high channel utilization. Initially, I was on channel 25, which consistently showed usage over 98%, as flagged by log warnings. I monitored other channels over a few days and found that channel 11 had lower utilization, around 3-5%. Thinking this would help, I switched the entire network to channel 11. However, this didn’t resolve the problem; instead, channel 11 quickly spiked to 95% utilization, while channel 25 dropped to 5-10%.
Has anyone encountered a similar issue or have suggestions on potential solutions? Any insights on optimizing the Zigbee network in this setup would be greatly appreciated.
I use default Pi power supply.
In the logs, I can see the specific devices where the delays occur. For example, in a scene that turns off all the lights, some switches experience delays of 15-20 seconds. Interestingly, this often happens to a switch that is just over a meter away from the coordinator’s antenna. It seems more likely that the problem is with channel utilization. Currently, I’m on channel 11, and here’s the current situation:
“energy_scan”: {
“11”: 98.93395819824867,
“12”: 43.057636198227904,
“13”: 19.00785284282869,
“14”: 9.713248103580147,
“15”: 62.257682586134884,
“16”: 46.26944564832987,
“17”: 46.26944564832987,
“18”: 2.2107128772756957,
“19”: 46.26944564832987,
“20”: 10.914542804728702,
“21”: 21.09014924761344,
“22”: 6.011489450827149,
“23”: 10.914542804728702,
“24”: 39.90320178295578,
“25”: 3.6632469452765037,
“26”: 78.25348754651363
Forget about the energy scan for a minute - you said you already moved your channels and that the utilization moved with them.
Check your logs and the automation traces for anything which stands out, and paste one of your problematic automations (and its trace) here.
I know there have been reports of lights not being turned on together when you switch on/off a bunch of them at once instead of using zigbee groups, so it could be that. However, the traces will probably paint a clearer picture
I’ve never had much luck turning on many (>5) lights at once. I tried putting them in zigbee groups (not HA groups) and that helped some. So from my experience, long delays getting 10+ devices to change at the same time is not surprising. For the automations I have that need to change many devices, I’ve ended up breaking them up into separate steps and putting in delays between them to get them to work.
