ZHA Needs Reloading Often

I need to reload the ZHA integration entry for my SONOFF dongles once a day, on average. I have added some new blinds to my system and they often stop responding to commands. I have some older ones from the same manufacturer that have had the same behavior, but not as often. I have replaced the dongle with the new Dongle Max MG24, but it still behaves the same way. As soon as I reload, they work fine. I’ve added 4 more plugs to extend the mesh (total of 6) plus I have an Ikea TRADFI driver that also helps (7 additional routers altogether).

There have been a number of previous threads with a similar issue, it usually comes down to the blinds spamming the mesh.

Is there a solution to this “spamming”.

More routers would help. In your image you have very few connections between routers - the main links seem to be back to the coordinator. If one of your devices is sending an abnormally high number of messages the mesh will get clogged up very quickly. You need a lot of connections so that there are alternative routes.

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So, is there a way to force the routers to link to each other?

No. You need more of them.

so, for 17 end nodes, I need more than 7 additional routers?

It depends entirely on the layout and structure of your house. You could need 20 or more.

Add them between your existing routers, starting from the coordnator and working outwards. This is not like adding wi-fi extenders - the idea is to blanket the whole area with connections.

I use Z2M and experienced this network spamming - I finally identified (using MQTT Explorer) which devices were sending the most messages. I would hope that some level of debugging in ZHA would help reveal the same kind of information for investigation.

My solution was to throttle some devices, to disable reporting or alter reporting thresholds/intervals for some attributes of my sensors. For power monitoring on busier devices I reduced the number of decimal places being reported. For extremely chatty devices I noted which attribute changes were triggering updates and dispensed with those (some of them were illuminance, current, voltage, target distance on some presence sensors)

2 devices went to the electronics recycle - they were just not configurable to shut them up :slight_smile:

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