Zigbee dimmer refusing to be added - yet 13 identical siblings are thriving on the mesh

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1

I have been installing ELKO zigbee dimmers (SmartDim vri Uni 200W RS PH - ELKO) in my home, and have successfully added 13 of the same kind already. This one dimmer however is not showing up and I am absolutely flabbergasted as to why it is not being discovered and added. It is located 5 cm from another dimmer of the same kind that should be acting as a repeater

My setup:
• Running on a raspberry Pi with Sonoff Zigbee 3.0 USB Dongle (2 floors away, so signal probably not the strongest here – but plenty of signal-repeating dimmers nearby)
• Currently 32 zigbee devices in the mesh – 10 battery-powered sensors and switches, 22 powered signal-repeating dimmers and dimmer pucks

This is what I’ve tried so far:
• Adding it the way I usually do, via /zha/add
• Adding it via the closest dimmer, “add devices via this device”
• Resetting the dimmer
• Having the electrician replace the dimmer with a new dimmer, in case it was a faulty HW device

Has anyone experienced something similar? If yes, how did you solve it? I will soon be bald from scratching my head on this mystery

2

Hi, welcome to the forum!

AFAIK battery powered devices don’t function as repeaters anyway and I’m not sure about the dimmers either.

3

Does the dongle put a limit on the number of devices it can support? The number 32 is a bit suspect in that context, being an integer power of 2.

4

Is it the E or P dongle?
I found this for the E version: “* Max direct children: 32.” from SONOFF Zigbee 3.0 USB Dongle Plus-E - SONOFF Official

5

Hello, I have the same problem.
Thermostat - Works well,
Dimmer, SmartSwitch, Temp/Hum - does noe show in the Zigbee search.
Using: SONOFF Zigbee 3.0 USB Dongle Plus V2