With unstable I mean that in a week somtimes a light doesn’t turn on/change colour, or on occation actions take a long time. Not insanely unstable, but enogh to want to improve it.
I’ve done everything in Hedda’s guide to keep my network stable.
Among others:
- zigbee on channel 25, wifi on channel 1 and 6.
- I use a PoE adapter (SLZB-06M) so I avoid USB 3.0 issues, and have been able to try out different placements of the coordinator.
- IKEA routers strategically placed for even more routes.
- Pairing devices in their final destination ALWAYS!
- None of my router devices lose power unless I pull a fuse. They’re always powered.
- I’ve added a screnshot of the network visualization (just in case someone’s curious), the two devices offline are in my garage after flipping a fuse. They will probably be back tomorrow.
Reasons for the zigbee being unstable:
- In part the choise of equipment. I feel like 75% of zigbee issues on these forums are because of poor equipment, and when we first have bought it, we’re stuck trying to mitigate the issues.
- I have IKEA roller blinds which are quirky, and might spend a whole day before trying to find a new route, or drains its battery or whatnot.
- I have 21 power plugs from 3 different providers, some are quirky, and probably all very chatty.
If I knew then what I know now I would have chosen wi-fi plugs.
- Automations use power data from these plugs, and or turn them on and off.
I have one automation in the garage which blinks a light, i.e. more zigbee traffic. - limitations in zigbee lights which doesn’t allow you to change colour while they’re off means multiple commands to dim them up with a new colour.
- Turning off a group of 63 lights works, but status updates from the same 63 lighs simultaneusly doesn’t.
Most of my lights are luckily philips hue lights, but naturally adjusting many at the same time creates more traffic, wich a low traffic network doesn’t like.
Zigbee is meant for low power low traffic. (Like lights and door sensors) But you can buy anything from poor lights which break routes to powerplugs which are chatty. And knowledge that you shouldn’t have many chatty devices is sparse on the internet.
Information about multicast is also both sparse and conflicting. It’s nice to use for a good user experience, but apparently floods the network enourmously. Try creating two groups of 2 lights (4 lights in total) and turning on/off both the groups simultaneusly from HA. Fails more often than it works, but there’s no guidance other than trial and error about these issues.
Finding out if a device really is chatty is also a big issue with ZHA, which is the reason I’ve started moving the house over to Z2M, which also allows me to use ZHA in the garage.
Point is: Zigbee is great for many, but has inherent issues people either accept or work around. And when the networks get large, power users search for other options, like Z2M or using other protocols in addition.
That’s why some of us want several working meshes instead of one big crappy mesh when it doesn’t work like one.
My years with zigbee continues to be a long learning process.
After a whole day of “google-fu” I found this HACS script which I will try before continuing my process of moving to z2m.