Zigbee mesh "organisation" / improving mesh?

Configuration Zigbee
1

Heya guys,

I have a zigbee mesh network, with 3 “routers” set up through the home (let’s call them: front, up, back).
The house is long, so I have 3 repeaters at various points in the house to allow the zigbee devices to jump to the nearest/most powerful signal, which then should be routed/repeated through to the HA conbee II .

I’m using the official conbee integration, and not using DeCONZ.

I have noticed that occasionally a zigbee switch will blink red and have issues communicating - which is odd since the plug is literally around the corner (~2-4 meters away).
Looking in the visualisation within HA, I can see that one of the switches is actually linked to a switch at the other end of the house - any communication would literally have to go through extra walls + flooring and past one zigbee router in order to get to the one it’s connecting to.
This seems to be the situation for a few of the switches I have (and I currently have no other zigbee devices).

This seems insane to me - so I was wondering if there is something I can do to help let the zigbee devices know “if you connect here you’ll have a much better time”. Or maybe group them?

I thought zigbee would be best left alone to just send the messages out so the powered devices would pick up the messages and route them between themselves - but it doesn’t seem to be the case here.

Any help would be appreciated here - I could keep dumping more routers into the plugs, I think the current layout should be covering the home sufficiently and not over-swamp the radio frequencies.

–
Whizz

2

How did you include the switches?

In their final location or next to the coordinator?

You really need to include them at the location they will be used.

Start by including the router devices closest to the coordinator and work your way away.

Then do the non router devices in their locations.

3

Thanks.

So, the co-ordinator (conbee II in this instance) is in my HA.
It’s currently next to “front” (as I’ve just shifted it into a Raspberry Pi) but will soon be closest to “up”, and be in a clear line-of-sight to it (~7 meters away).

All 3 routers (ikea’s) can communicate to each other and the co-ordinator (HA) strongly… Which I would expect from wall powered devices TBH.
The switches ere all set up in-place, and when they were added they were added through the routers (I have the specific router search for the new device when adding).

The problem I see is that my “prime example” switch doesn’t connect straight down (through the floor) to the “front” router… Nor does it connect through a wall to the “up” router… It goes through the same wall, through the “up” router, through the floor, and then to the “back” router.
If I were to draw it on a comparable diagram it’s be a pythagoras “3-4-5” triangle, where the switch doesn’t go straight down to the bottom or midway in the hypotenuse - it goes all the way to the furthest corner.

Like I said, I understand that zigbee should “self heal” - but currently it’s just picking the worse router possible… So being able to “group”, “bind” or “prioritise” some of the devices to a router would be handy… But I can’t find much about mesh optimisation outside of “make sure you get routers to act and zigbee sorts itself out” …

–
Whizz

4

IKEA repeaters are pretty bad repeaters.

Are these Xiaomi switches? Xiaomi devices are known to be picky about their routes.

You can’t do that, you may be able to initially fix the route, but afterwards the devices might change their route.

Best option is to add more mains powered devices to your mesh.