Zigbee light patrol

Configuration
1

Zigbee became very unreliable for me lately. All my zigbee light switches have neutral wires so technically they should all be routers, I have a few IKEA tradfri outlet controls around to act as repeaters etc and despite all this every day some (random) lights become unavailable.

Most light switch modules are alibaba stuff but for some reason I couldn’t find two way / dimmer / >1 gang modules produced by known brands. I expect a significant WAF warning very soon.

I made an easy check for battery powered zigbee devices (these are more critical as they’re water leak sensors etc):

alias: Catch unavailable sensors
description: ""
trigger:
  - platform: template
    value_template: >-
      {{
      (expand(state_attr('binary_sensor.all_battery_sensors','entity_id'))|selectattr('state','in',
      ['unavailable', 'unknown', 'none'])|list | count) > 0 }}
  - platform: time
    at: "09:00:00"
  - platform: time
    at: "18:00:00"
condition: []
action:
  - variables:
      v_trigger_sensor_entity: |
        {{ expand(state_attr('binary_sensor.all_battery_sensors','entity_id'))
          |selectattr('state', 'in', ['unavailable', 'unknown', 'none'])
          |map(attribute='entity_id') }}
      v_trigger_sensor_name: |
        {{ expand(state_attr('binary_sensor.all_battery_sensors','entity_id'))
          |selectattr('state', 'in', ['unavailable', 'unknown', 'none'])
          |map(attribute='name')
          |join('\n') }}
  - if:
      - condition: template
        value_template: >-
          {{
          (expand(state_attr('binary_sensor.all_battery_sensors','entity_id'))|selectattr('state',
          'in', ['unavailable', 'unknown', 'none'])|list | count) > 0 }}
    then:
      - device_id: XXX
        domain: mobile_app
        type: notify
        message: {{ v_trigger_sensor_name }} are unavailable, please check!
        title: Unavailable devices
        enabled: true
      - service: button.press
        target:
          entity_id: "{{ v_trigger_sensor_entity }}"
    else:
      - device_id: XXX
        domain: mobile_app
        type: notify
        message: All battery sensors are available, high five!
        title: No unavailable devices
        enabled: true
mode: single

all_battery_sensors is a binary sensor group. I make a cheeky attempt at a button.press when I catch an unavailable sensor but it never worked so far.

Sadly, this approach won’t work with a lot of the zigbee light problems as they are almost always available (at least seemingly available) but when they are turned on / off by HA they don’t obey to the order.

Before I jump into scripting, are there any solutions out there for this already? Solution is ideally to automatically fix but that’s probably too aggressive, even catching the problematic devices and notifying me is a big step.

I’m hoping I am not the only one facing this challenge :slight_smile:

2

Yo mention nothing about your actual setup, so might be hard to help… What Zigbee coordinator you use, what integration? Devices placement, any possible interferences with WiFi or other 2.4GHz devies?
You can find quite few threads in this forum dedicated to Zigbee troubleshooting, some going very deep into technicalities.

3

Great point, thanks so much for taking the time to point out. My original intention was not to troubleshoot my zigbee network but rather build a failsafe on top of it but potentially turning on / off some of the switches & lights, and catch the ones that didn’t.

But you’re totally right, I’ll make another post asking for help in optimizing the network itself. I did a lot of reading and applied all theories I learnt - still having sub-par performance from the network.