So some quick background. I had a Zigbee network running with Hubitat, maybe 16 devices including 4 battery locks and a battery blind. I know all about repeaters, battery end devices, ect. This network ran flawlessly with Hubitat. I switch to HA, Raspberry Pi 5, and added a ZBT-2. I switched to a metal shielded Pi case that helped slightly. Devices would drop out randomly and battery devices never worked. I swapped out my Zigbee 1.x devices and moved to all Zigbee 3. That helped, But still problems, especially battery devices.
So I just want to get it running. I know the network is fine. So that leaves the ZBT-2 or ZHT firmware. My guess is the ZBT-2 is the problem. Is it worth replacing with a different Zigbee coordinator? Mine is definitly not working robustly.
Do you still have the Hubitat? If so, there is a HACS integration that can connect it to Home Assistant, I believe. If the connection is stable there, why not keep it?
Thanks. Initially that was my plan, to keep the Hubitat as is, but connecting Hubitat to Home Assistant is not trivial, as it involves a fair bit of custom coding on the Hubitat side. It still might be an option.
So I guess my original question was, could a poorly working ZBT-2 cause many network problems to occur? And reading further into many other questions here, the answer is a big YES. Since my network of devices didn’t change at all, that really helps to narrow things down. I guess I had initially assumed that it was the chip in the dongle that did all the low level work of keeping the Zigbee network running, but I think its more complex than that. I guess my first gut was correct, the ZBT-2 is not a great coordinator, at least in my case.
My battery devices were stable on Smartthings for a few years, but I was dropping 1 a day in HA until I added some ThirdReality nightlights. Been rock solid since. May just be how HA is building out the mesh and needs a bit more backbone for those particular battery devices.
Thanks. That is helpful. I’ve been using many ThirdReality devices and they are very good. Also, Shelly has some good stuff.
Anyway I FINALLY found my problem. As I said I was moving from Hubitat to Home Assistant when this problem occured. As it turned out, HA picked to use channel 20, which turned out to be a bad choice. After I switched off Hubitat, I noticed that it was using channel 15. So I switched HA to channel 15, and sure enough, everything started to work correctly. So the moral of the story is don’t assume ZHA “smart” channel selection is all that smart.
With more research I discovered Zigbee channel numbers are DIFFERENT than WiFi channel numbers. I don’t think many people know that. Typically, WiFi channels used in 2.4GHz are 1, 6, and 11 but WiFi channels can be wide, so there is slight overlap. Zigbee channel 15 falls between WiFi channel 1 and WiFi channel 6 so it can be a good choice. Zigbee channel 20 can fall beween WiFi channel 6 and WiFi channel 11, but nothing guarantees your neighbors are sticking to 1, 6, amd 11 for WiFi. Zigbee channel 26 can be good but I hear not all devices support it.
It helps to set you wifi Channel bandwidth to 20mhz for the 2.4Ghz as this restricts the spread.
In my experience it also takes a day or so for a zigbee network to settle and become stable, whether this is true or just in my imagination is yet to be discovered
Once the network has been running for a few days it will be srong and stable.
