This seems to be a unique issue compared to the normal “zigbee devices go offline” posts I see. I have 15 zigbee devices, mostly wall plugs (so they act as repeaters), and they constantly go offline for hours/days at a time, then come back. More devices seems to make it worse not better, or at least, the ratio of “going offline” stays the same which means more of them do it as I add more. The weird thing is I have some of them exposed via HA to Google Assistant so I can voice command them on/off, and that still works. So the device is there, and it’s talking to ZHA I assume or Google couldn’t talk to them, but HA doesn’t see them.
Can anyone point me in the right direction on this one?
Just as a follow-up to my own issue, in case someone else runs across this (don’t we all hate when someone has the same issue but no posted solution?), it solved itself. I had turned off HA/ZHA for a couple hours, which is supposed to force everything to figure out their ideal connections again from scratch, but that made things worse… for a while. Eventually all the connections got better and things stopped dropping. Some of the connections still don’t make any sense (devices connected to devices far away rather than the plug right next to it), but it’s a lot better. If I have the issue again I might switch to zigbee2mqtt, which sounds like it’s a little better for device reliability.
Still not sure why Google could talk to my zigbee devices and HA couldn’t, but if things don’t go offline it’s a moot issue.