Hi,
I installed a new home assistant server to my friend’s house, we are facing a problem with zha integration, the zigbee network consist of sonoff dongle e as a cordinator and 2 sonoff dongles with router firmware in each floor (powered by ups) and 35 powered devices, the switches work fine and respond so fast until the power outage occurs, when power is back the all switches are not responding and it take up to 5 mints or zha reloaded to back to work, during this time if the actual switch is pressed it send the feedback to zha and change the state so it’s connected !
This sounds like normal behaviour. Devices which are not routers do not communicate continually with the coordinator, they check in at intervals - most of them are battery-powered and this is to save battery. The connection is initiated by the device itself, not by the coordinator, so it may be some time before HA knows they are there. If they are triggered, however, (by a button being pressed, say) they make contact immediately.
all the switches are 220v and work as router, all the devices are not responding even after press the physical switch, it’s only sending the actual state without responding from home assistant until the zha are reloaded or waiting long period of time to pass (5 to 10 mints)
Yes it sounds like it is working as designed. There are pros and cons when using any native integrations.
The bad news is that there a downside to using Home Assistant’s built-in native ZHA integration as Zigbee Gateway solution compared to using any external stand-alone Zigbee Gateway solution is that your whole Zigbee network will be down during restart of Home Assistant or power outage, (which is not the case with example Zigbee2MQTT, Phoscon/deCONZ, and commercial gateways/hubs/bridges such Philips Hue Bridge, IKEA Trådfri Gateway, or SmartThings Hub/Station).
FYI, it also looks like zigpy developer(s) have begun work on external and stand-alone implementations of ZHA, which if it is the case could make it possible to run the ZHA integration as an external and/or stand-alone application on your local network → Zigpy developer(s) begun work on external and stand-alone implementations of ZHA
The good news if you are using the new Home Assistant 2024.4 release with the latest Home Assistant Operating System (Home Assistant OS) on Raspberry Pi 4 or better hardware then Home Assistant now boots twice as fast and integrations are now loading significantly faster than ever, (where as before one slow integration could prevent other integrations from starting directy). See → https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2024/04/03/release-20244/#even-more-performance (restarting the whole Home Assistant OS including ZHA should now not take longer than 2-minutes, where the ZHA integration startup time is tha longest part at around 20-30 seconds)
Today there are some other things you can do other than upgrading the hardware that it is running on;
Configure Zigbee binding inside ZHA between Zigbee wall-switches or remotes and specific Zigbee lights that you absolutly need/want working when Home Assistant is not available, (this has significant other acceptance parameters if and when setup correctly). See → https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/zha#binding-and-unbinding
Add a small UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) to your Home Assistant OS installation so that it still have some battery power even when have a short power outage → Uninterruptible power supply - Wikipedia (This is usually a great idea for Home Assistant and Ethernet + WiFi in any smart home solution regardless and since a majority of power outages only last a few minutes you can normally get far on a less expensive UPS with a small UPS)
By the way, I highly recommend using smart wall-switches or smart dimmer-switches in combination with dumb lights/lightbulbs instead of using the combination wireless switches and lights/lightbulbs. If you use smart wall-switches in combination with dumb lights/lightbulbs then those will always continue to work manually even if your Zigbee gateway is down or battery is low.
Tip though is to prefer Zigbee smart switches with neutral as most if those will work as Zigbee Router devices (and not use Zigbee smart switches without neutral as those are all Zigbee End Devices that will not work as Zigbee repeater/extender). Personally I currently use Z-Wave smart dimmer modules but the principle is the same, (the smart dimmers I use are also modules that you install behind your old dumb switch in order to convert them into smart switches and smart dimmers).
In addition, note that proper installations of Home Assistant and ZHA should normally be so stable that they almost never hangs and thus they should not need to be restarted or your computer rebooted other than at at upgrades or installations of new integrations. So if are restarting or rebooting more often than that due to hangs then some else is wrong.
When Home Assistant and ZHA are working stable as intended then you should plan to only perform a planned upgrade once a month or so, (and preferably only at the end of the month when the latest release version has stabilized).
If that is the case then be sure to also tell your friend to try to plan his maintenance upgrades as a more suitable time when no one else in the household is pressing switches.
thank you so much for your informative reply,
In my case HA server, zigbee cordinator and zigbee routers all powered from UPS and do not down during the power outage, only the switches are turned off and on during the power outage, I have HA in my house with the same setup and the switches back to work so fast after power outage, only takes 10 seconds in at most