Which Zigbee devices are recommended?

Over the years I accumulated quote a few Zigbee Devices. Form various vendors. My summary so far: Zigbee is quite a finicky protocol.

What annoys me the most is that the majority of devices don’t adapt a reconfiguration of the network topology - but according to the standard they should. For example when I introduce a new Router - or plug an existing Router into a new power plug, only a few devices can handle this.

Xiaomi/Aqara devices for example connect only to the one endpoint they have been paired with. They only do this one and only connection - and they only do this once (during pairing). Not very fault tolerant. And far from the mesh-topology the Zigbee standard is talking about.

Some other devices from, for example, SONOFF or Heiman, handle this situation a bit better. Bit still far from perfect.

Another, basically never implemented, feature is Battery lifetime: it’s useless. This are the 3 cases I’ve seen so far:

  • it always shows 100%
  • it shows a, more or less, random percentage - I’ve even seen negative values
  • it shows a, more or less, random voltage

So, in summary: All the devices that you can buy from Aliexpress, etc., from vendors like TuYa, SONOFF, Xiaomi, Aqara, and what not, seem to only implement a bare minimum of the Zigbee features.

So my question: Are there other vendors that you could recommend?

Xiaomi’s Zigbee 3.0 devices will happily change parent

Innr is also generally good, but … nobody has to follow the Zigbee spec to the letter so pretty much nobody does.

Buy Zigbee 3.0 devices and you’ll have less problems.

ZHA docs has five sections related on the topic

https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/zha#knowing-which-devices-are-supported

https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/zha#zha-exception-and-deviation-handling

https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/zha#best-practices-to-avoid-pairingconnection-difficulties

https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/zha#zigbee-interference-avoidance-and-network-rangecoverage-optimization

https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/zha#defining-zigbee-channel-to-use

I’ve had good experiences with IKEA devices: they adapt well to the network and the battery level is okay. (Remember that CR235 batteries do not have linear voltage/capacity responses, so it’s unlikely a device will give you a reliable measurement anyway.) that said, I find that every month or so one or two of my 50+ IKEA lights loses the network and needs to be re-added. They are quite cheap, though.