Zigbee ... Gateway or something that works

Hello,

I used Deconz and Phoscon for many years and was happy with them. It was stable and there were no problems.

Last year I unfortunately had to change because not all devices were supported anymore.

I have a wildly mixed network of Sonoff, Aqara, Blitzwolf, Illumize, nodon, Busch Jaeger Lightlink, Osram, Philips, Moes and more.

So I bought the Sonoff Dongle-E, put the last firmware on it and started… unfortunately not happy. The transmitting power / the receiving power was fantastic but devices regularly disappeared from my network. (with Zigbee2mqtt and zha). In addition, the routing was better in my opinion under Phoscon.

So next try… Sonoff Dongle-P bought, , last firmware on it and started… unfortunately not happy. The transmitting power / the receiving power was just bad. Even devices in 3 meters distance had partly a LQI of 60… This problem I have then compensated over the sheer mass of zigbee devices.

A year later I have to set up everything again from scratch which is no fun with the number of devices. Sometimes I have to open flush-mounted sockets to connect devices.

I have a Unifi network and the channels separated from zigbee. There should be no problems here.

I also want to stay with Zigbee, because I dont want to extend the IP limit of my Sophos UTM Home.

I’m getting tired of having to fiddle with the network over and over again.

I just want a gateway / hub that just works. N

Any recommendations?

Thanks a lot!

I’m guessing that you were able to have your nearest devices a bit further away with a dedicated hub that has a larger antenna on it and once you moved to a dongle you lost that antenna distance and now your nearest devices are at the edge of the “field of view” of the dongle.

How far from the dongle is your closest mains-powered Zigbee device (i.e., router)? Did you plug your dongle into a USB extension and have it plugged it into a powered USB hub (if using a micro computer like rPi)?

I used the conbee 1 stick for nearly 5 years at the same place and with the sonoff it isnt working. The stick is on a extension cable near my rack. The nearest device is maybe 2 meters away.

I must say that I don’t understand what do you mean by “devices are disappearing” .
Devices can became unavailable but hardly they can disappear.
You think that you have coordinator problem. Maybe but maybe you have a lot of end devices without or with a few zigbee routers and that is killing your coordinator.

Diaspearing from the network. Most of my devices are powered and routers.

Just an image of my fresh start with distances.

Even at this early state there should be more than enought routers.

Thats half of the first floor, but i am lost the mood for today.

It depends. I have 80+ zigbee devices and more than 20 routers. In average one router on 4 end devices.
Maybe you have a coordinator problem.
I bought my from this guy and everything is working mostly fine. I had before another 26* coordinator but I accidentally destroy it.

Yeah maybe it’s the coordinator. I give it a try. That the third one I am trying. Maybe I give hubitat a try.

Look maybe everything is ok with your coordinators. I don’t know and it hard to tell from your post. Maybe you just messed something up in your ha installation.
Generally zigbee is working stable unless you put in it some bluetooth devices. This can demolish zigbee network.

I don’t use Bluetooth. It try to stick to zigbee and besides WiFi it’s the only wireless technology i use. I had no problem with the Conbee 1 stick (accept that the stick is outdated). I simply switched my network to the new coordinator and the problems startet. The dongle-e has perfect coverage but devices are dropping from time to time (mostly battery powered and the Philips devices). Then the problems begin to start because the network is missing some routers then. The dongle-p has connectivity issues (as you see on the screenshot) but most of the devices stayed in the network. But here the reaction time is really slow. So it s taking some time so switch a light on at the outer end of the network.

Again, maybe it is coordinator problem. Maybe not. As I know from other people experiences some zigbee devices just doesnt coop up good with others brands. And this also might give you problems. I mostly use tuya zigbee devices, but not all of them from tuya. For now everything is working fine. I have just problem with one room and there is a bluetooth speaker.
When I going to buy zigbee devices I like to check does they meet zigbee 3.0 standard and I didn’t had any major problems.

I am fairly positive that you take the low LQI readings with the dongle-p with a grain of salt. I have had the same experience, I switched to dongle-E, everything was green but I had devices dropping left and right, with responses being slow over time.

Switched back to dongle-p. I have it on a 10m powered USB2 cable from Amazon in the middle of my house. I have over 147 devices, about 65 routers and the rest end devices. Network map below:

There is a lot of red there and whites but everything seems to be working fine. I occasionally have 1 button drop but usually that is because of a weakening battery. All going fine for a few years now.

As mentioned above, I did try the experiment of migrating to Dongle-E but that was a nightmare :smiley:, as one says “dont fix what’s not broken” :smiley: Switched back to dongle-p and all has been good for about 2 months now.

What zigbee and wifi channels. Were the E & P on the same channel as the Conbee?

Comparing lqi between E & P is irrelevant, the chips use different scales. My P networks all have similar lqi to what you posted and are trouble free.

What firmware on the P? The May firmware build has known problems. If that’s what you are running, try the 20230922 build here.

Thanks. I will try the new firmware. I will also give the SLZB-06 a shot since it’s Poe powered and I can place it in the center of the house. (Near to one of my ap ac pros :joy::rofl: not the best decision). The SLZB-06 has a quite good reputation as far as I read. I will give you a feedback how it turned out.

I’m experiencing exactly the same thing. Zigbee is terrible in my house. Did you ever find any solutions?

I’ve also tried sonoff-p, sonoff-e, and skyconnect. Maybe I’ll have to give z2m and the sonoff-p a try again because that seemed at least a little more reliable. The silabs ember based coordinators all appear to have massive bugs, either in firmware or in z2m/zha, I just can’t get them to work reliably. My setup is near identical to yours, a unifi network on different channels than the zigbee network, lots of routers all over, and still terrible performance and connectivity.

I’ve tried literally everything from all of the troubleshooting posts and issues. Different coordinator locations. Different extension cables. Different coordinators. Different firmwares. ZHA. Z2M. Different channels (and switching wifi channels so they don’t overlap the new channel). Nothing seems to help much. Zigbee is just terrible in my house.

Hmm it looks like nordic semiconductor zboss based sticks are working with z2m and zha now. That’s the only thing I haven’t tried. Maybe an entirely different manufacturer/stack will help?

I have a sonoff Dongle_E and its been rock solid, no issues for over 2 years.
Very occasionally the odd aqara device drops off the network, but these are known to NOT re-route if their router goes down (I have some smart bulbs in wall power outlets that sometimes get turned off on accident).

I’m running a network of around 80 devices, without about 50% of these being mains powered router devices.

Read and try to follow ALL the tips here regardless of which Zigbee Coordinator you are using before you troubleshoot any deeper → Zigbee networks: how to guide for avoiding interference + optimize using Zigbee Router devices (repeaters/extenders) to get a stable mesh network with best possible range and coverage

I’ve already done that, multiple times, but thanks for linking it again for others who may have not.

I know you have read the guide but a couple of things that have helped me firm up issues in my Zigbee (some as recently as this week) that might be worth a thought or re-visit if you have’t done them:

  • Go through everything using 2.4GHz. Some of these things include various devices that have their own AP (ESPHome, Shelly) and some hubs (Phillips Hue). I saw an instant impact on my Zigbee network when I “trimmed the fat” from erroneous AP’s and hubs. In my case my ISP also enables wifi directly on the router. I figured that if i wasn’t in total control of the channels then I didn’t need it in my life and that my core mesh Wifi + Zigbee was more important than those. If I wasn’t using the WiFi for anything needing 2.4, I only let it run the 5GHz network (ISP, backup ISP).
  • If you cannot eliminate the erroneous 2.4GHz stuff entirely, you could try shutting it down for a day and see if anything improves.
  • After trying Zigbee on channel 24-25 to allow my WiFi to exist on 1 and 6, I found no stability improvement, but reversing that and allowing Zigbee to use 11 and moving my WiFi and mesh to 6 and 11 made a world of difference, it became ultra responsive and every device came online within a minute or two. This is to say that even though you might have gone through and carefully set up channels to not overlap, they could still not be good channels - some Zigbee devices prefer lower channels, others don’t care, it’s worth exploring.
  • Taking Sonoff Dongle 3.0’s and reflashing them as routers. I had some spare, but in hindsight I would buy extras just to have some very powerful radios shoring up the weak spots on my home, especially those that are susceptible to interference or blockage, like the basement or garage.

While chipsets might give you some extra stability, 2.4GHz is 2.4GHz and unless you are using off-the-wall Zigbee controllers, I wouldn’t expect that massive of a difference since most use the same chipset (or one of a small handful of chips that do this at all).

Unfortunately I’ve also done those things. I have no devices broadcasting access points I don’t control. I’ve tried different channels (and switched wifi aps channels so they don’t overlap the channel each time). I’m not using mesh networking. My APs are all PoE powered Unifi devices.

Only thing I haven’t tried is flashing extra routers yet. I have lots of router devices though. No device in the house is more than ~10ft to a mains powered router device. I have 87 devices on the network right now and I actually have very few non-router devices (3 battery powered and 14 sengled bulbs which do not route). That means there are 70 routing devices spread all around my house – I doubt adding a couple more dedicated sticks as additional routers would change much.

I just bit the bullet and reflashed my sonoff-p (CC2652, z-stack) with the latest firmware and rebuilt the entire network on zigbee2mqtt. I also stuck a bigger antenna on the stick. Fingers crossed that it helps!