Zigbee hub/dongle and positioning - newbie questions

Hi there folks,

Total newbie here, so please go easy.

I’m hoping to run Home Assistant on my always-on fileserver. I’m completely new to this… The first target is to have intelligent control of a radiant heater in the bedroom and I’ve got a smart plug with Tasmota and some Zigbee temperature sensors on the way. My problem is that my fileserver is in the “office”, well away from the bedroom and the centre of the house. What’s the best way to connect the Zigbee sensors to HA?

This is a rental, so I can’t go digging through walls. My WiFi network consists of three Ubiquiti Unifi AP Lites, one by the TV (close to the centre of the house) meshed to the one by the main router and one in the office, connected by ethernet over powerline. I’m happy to devote a raspberry pi to this if it helps.

If I got something like a Sonoff Zigbee ZPDongle-E (as an example) and connected that to my fileserver, would it have the range to cover the house (from what is effectively one remote corner - not a huge house, though)?

Thanks in advance - Adam.

Possibly not. Zigbee relies on having a swarm of mains powered devices passing commands on from one to another. They are quite low powered - a typical setup would have zigbee lightbulbs throughout the building so that the distances involved were never more than a few yards. There’s a post about it here.

The Tasmota plug should be OK, though, provided the wi-fi is.

You could plug your dongle in a pi, and install zigbee2MQTT on the pi too. That way, you can position the pi anywhere you want.

1 Like

Or get an ethernet connected coordinator you can place where desired.

Thanks Stiltjack - tht makes sense. What is the expected range?

Thanks Francis - that might be a plan…

About 10 feet, I believe

About 10 feet, I believe

Huh, OK, that’s not going to work! Alright, RaspberryPi and Zigbee2MQTT might have to be the solution. Can anyone give me any pointers (even if it’s where to go to RTFM) on how HA running on a Linux fileserver would communicate with Pi acting as a Zigbee hub?

Range can be much more than 10ft, but that is probably a safe estimate for how router devices should be spaced for a good mesh.

I have some devices that like connect to a router on the other side of the house, more like 30 ft and through multiple walls.

https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/guide/installation/01_linux.html

https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/guide/configuration/mqtt.html

https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/guide/configuration/homeassistant.html