I’ve recently changed from a Philips Hue Bridge to a Skyconnect, using ZHA. Initially, I had both running and, when I installed and configured the Skyconnect and ZHA, it picked some different channel – 20-something, I think. I was getting a warning like this in the logs, so once I migrated everything over and unplugged the Hue Bridge, I used the (experimental) feature in ZHA to auto-pick a new channel. It picked 15 (the default), but I’m still getting these warnings.
Should I worry? The 35 devices (soon to be 38) seem to be working fine, and responding quickly. I have mostly routers (e.g., Philips Hue bulbs, smart plugs) and also have two Sonoff Zigbee Plus thingies (configured as routers) because I have thick stone walls. Maybe this is a problem only for the actual skyconnect and the routers are handling things?
The warning is concerning, so I’m basically asking: How concerned should I be?
Do you live in an apartment and by chance all your neighbors have WiFi?
Long story short: I tried with ZigBee and matter, failed hard (poor stability, devices dropping out of the mesh, poor reception even when a repeater is very close and with line of sight…). Then I tried esphome WiFi devices and they are stable and reliable - the opposite of my ZigBee journey.
ZigBee has poor range and always “looses” the battle against WiFi contested areas.
Also be aware when choosing channels - they are not the same as WiFi channels! Maybe their is still some hope left for you…
I’m in a semi-detached house in London, so, yes, neighbours with wifi.
But I’m not having any issues. My zigbee network seems to be working fine, although I do see a lot of red lines in the visualisation. I’m just wondering what, exactly, that warning means, and whether it indicates a problem that I need to address. It’s probable, or likely, that I was having the same problems on the Philips Hue Bridge (which I used for years), but just unaware of it.
I also have lots of wifi devices (WLEDs, ESP32, etc.) and they are also fine.
There are a couple of other threads about this, and the answer seems to be “not very”. Nobody seems to know what it means. As far as I know, nobody has reported problems that they can link definitively to it, but it does seem to have driven a couple of people to tear up perfectly good networks.
I get the message twice after each restart. For what it’s worth, the percentage seems to go down slightly when I add a new routing device, but that’s just anecdotal evidence.
I’ve also read on here that the visualization tool, in general, should be taken with a grain of salt and not used as a de-facto measure of your network. If it works and it works well, you likely have little to worry about. Just get those backups of HA and the Zigbee network regularly and you are set in case of a catastrophic failure.
