WTH ZHA can't handle multiple coordinator

Month of "What the heck?!"
1

Why it is not possible to add a second coordinator in ZHA?

2

Why would you want to?

3

I have a house with outbuildings far from my main coordinator. Zigbee doesn’t go that far. So I bought a second coordinator but I can’t add it in ZHA. I also can’t create a second instance of ZHA.

4

That’s actually a valid reason, very rarely do you actually want a second coordinator. I haven’t looked into it, but this will likely be possible once you can run ZHA separately from HA.

5

Because that’s the Zigbee spec. Full stop. One coordinator per Zigbee network.

So you will never get multiple coordinators per instance of ZHA.

Instead, what you’re asking for is parallel instances of your chosen Zigbee integration. (the ability to run two copies of ZHA. Etc.)

Also you CAN run Zigbee2MQTT on a standalone install and connect it back with MQTT - and you can have as many of those as you want. If you only need one instance you could use Websocket or a network connected coordinator. So you could have ZHA for main and a small Z2M install running a network coordinator for the outbuilding. Or multiple Z2M in multiple outbuildings each with thier own coordinator.

That said. Zigbee gets more powerful as you add repeating nodes, splitting networks is rarely the answer. Try to avoid it.

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6

As NathanCu said, Zigbee only supports one coordinator.

Here are your options:

  1. Add more Zigbee devices so that the network reaches
  2. Move to Matter-over-Thread which supports multiple “Border Routers”
  3. Advanced: set up a separate computer with Zigbee2MQTT and relay the messages to HA via MQTT instead of ZHA
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7

Indeed, since each Zigbee network can only have a single Zigbee Coordinator a more logical question/request would be to ask why you can not install two instances of the ZHA integration in one instance of Home Assiatant.

…and it seems like the zha/zigpy developers are slowly moving in that direction or are at least working on key features that would possibly allow that in the future, so if you are a developer and want to check it out or help then see this → [DO NOT MERGE] Add web socket server by dmulcahey · Pull Request #271 · zigpy/zha · GitHub

If you are an end-user then you can just wait however there are slme info and discussion about all that in this thread → Zigpy developer(s) begun work on external zha library and ZHA WebSocket Server ("ZHAWS") implementation to allow it to run as a stand-alone Zigbee Gateway application?

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