After browsing a lot of tickets around Zigbee and Zwave I wanted to get your opinion on what next steps I should take. To identify a little bit what I have going on at the moment:
HUE Lights (combined with IKEA Tradfri)
3D Printer hooked up to Octopi
Electricity & Gas meters using DSMR
Ring Doorbell
Home Assistant for combining everything and setting up automations etc.
Plans for future:
Temperature Sensors
Movement Sensors
Motorized sunblinds
Smart thermostat (probably Google Nest v3)
Current problems I’m having now:
My Hue coverage / range isn’t adequate, if my GF turns off the power switch to 1 light, my whole upstairs floor doesn’t respond to the HUE bridge anymore.
My cheap tradfri remotes do not work properly with hue
I don’t want too much Zigbee around my house, since it’s horrible for 2.4 GHz connections at home. eg limit it to the lights
Questions:
Do I want to buy a Z-Wave & Zigbee stick to plug into my home assistant?
** Will this extend the range for all connected devices already connected to the HUE Bridge?
Do I want to buy a Zigbee / Z-wave hub like Smartthings hub to have a one-off solution?
** Will this extend the range for all connected devices already connected to the HUE Bridge?
** Can I connect the tradfri remote to smartthings and then use them for the lights on the HUE bridge?
I see a lot of people that go for a Zstick when talking about Z-Wave, but that does not solve my Zigbee problem unfortunately.
IMO Zigbee is better than Z-Wave.
Another opinion is that Z-Wave on Home Assistant might not be ready for prime time yet.
I haven’t tried it recently but there has been a lot of work done lately so I could be wrong.
I’ve been using Z-Wave and Zigbee hubs for over 5 years and could not get Home Assistant Z-Wave or ZWave2MQTT working over the course of a couple nights and two attempts.
I use Hubitat, which is local.
It’s got a slow processor and low RAM, which is a problem but it is just a bridge to get Z-Wave and Zigbee into Home Assistant via a Custom Component that works very well.
As long as you’re not doing any custom drivers or applications in Hubitat and do it all in Home Assistant or Node-Red, like I do, it’s all very fast and local.
Adding devices to Hubitat is very easy.
SmartThings as well but SmartThings requires the cloud to do a lot, especially talk to Home Assistant.
For the Hue… I’d keep it all in Hue because it’s much better at handling light animations.
Just beef up your Zigbee mesh.
Replace physical switches with a Zigbee button your GF can press to toggle the lights therefor not taking it out of the mesh.
I have Hue, Hubitat and 2.4GHz WiFi all humming along pretty well IMO.
Get a rolled up newspaper and bop her every time she flips a switch (Joking, of course). Toggling power is the absolute worst thing you can do with smart bulbs unless they are designed for it (like the Philips Wiz WiFi bulbs). As @keithcroshaw said, get some Zigbee buttons or switch replacements for your traditional switches. This will stop that from happening.
This is a myth. Zigbee and 2.4ghz Wifi can coexist together with a bit of preparedness beforehand. Make sure your WiFi access points are set to a low channel (usually between 1 and 6) and keep your Zigbee channel above 11 (most people go with channels 15-25). This separates the wavelengths enough to avoid frequency bleed over. As for the Ikea remotes, they are battery devices and without a good mesh supporting them, they are going to suck. Once you have a few repeaters in your mesh, they will perform better.
IMHO, having a Zigbee controller on Home Assistant is the easiest way to go. No, it will not extend your Hue mesh; Only buying more bulbs and attaching them to your Hue mesh will do that.
Zigbee is a mesh networking protocol (just like a Wifi mesh network). What that means is that the initial range of the controller (Hue hub, external stick, etc) is small, but it gets bigger by adding repeater devices to your mesh. So, in my house, I have about 6 plug sockets hidden all around the house. Their whole purpose in life is to merely extend the mesh for my sensors (of which I have a TON) and other devices. The same thing applies to the Hue hub, but for that ecosystem, bulbs are the best repeaters. So, even having a bulb or socket tucked away somewhere that you don’t use, will help extend the reach of your Hue mesh and provide better coverage.
I should have mentioned I agree with @code-in-progress, I have tried the Native ZHA (Zigbee) integration with the Conbee stick on Home Assistant and it worked pretty well to bring the devices into Home Assistant. I can’t say I had any problems with it.
To add to @code-in-progress’s excellent explanations, to maybe make it a bit more clear, another zigbee stick/hub will create a separate zigbee mesh and devices in the HUE ZigBee mesh can’t communicate with the zigbee mesh from the other stick/hub, this also means that they will not act as repeaters for devices in the other zigbee mesh.
In my experience it’s the best to move everything to a single ZigBee stick, so in your case, ditching the Hue hub and pair the devices with the new ZigBee stick.
I ditched my Hue hub more than 3 years ago and never looked back.
As mentioned already, that’s just a wrongly configured setup.
I have well over 50 ZigBee devices and at least 10-15 WiFi 2.4 GHz clients and my WiFi connection is perfectly fine.
For your “wife cuts power to the bulbs” problem, I put a Hue Dimmer Switch (can’t replace the physical switches as I’m living in a rented apartment) next to each physical light switch and “educated” my wife to only use the physical switch in case the Hue Dimmer switch doesn’t work, which she only had to do one day in the last 3 years when I was migrating Home Assistant from a Pi to an Intel NUC.
To be fair, I’ve moved nearly all my smart bulbs over to Philips Wiz WiFi bulbs (SUPER cheap and they work really well compared to their Zigbee brethren) otherwise I would have been at 95 Zigbee devices.
Not trying to re-route this but do you have anything that makes nice color animations for your RGB devices?
Like I have a hue app that picks from a color gradient to make very smooth dynamic color changes.
I’d be fine with switching to Home Assistant’s ZHA as Hubitat drops the ball on sending tons of fine color changes like Hue handles, but I haven’t seen anything comparable for HA. EDIT - I haven’t looked extensively either…
If something exists awesome I’d love to know, but without it, respectfully, I think Hue 3rd party apps still rule when it comes to creating nice color animations.
…I’d love to ditch it and have one zigbee network though…
Thanks a lot for the explanation. It seems I have to go with a conbee stick to expand the zigbee network outside of my hue lights and control it further from HA itself.
Buried somewhere in one of my NR flows, I wrote something like that for Zigbee RBG lights. I’ll see if I can find it somewhere. It worked really well with ZHA (using ZHA group calls for paired bulbs).
I’ve got 3 Zigbee networks going right now; Hue (which ONLY has my Ikea GU-10s and Ikea Drivers), ZHA, and a test ZHA network.
Let me add my 1p.
I haveo both ZigBee and Z-Wave.
Z-wave is running on an old Vera Plus, but due to the poor support of Vera (now an Ezlo company) I’m waiting for Z-way.me to be officially supported and integrated directly into HA.
On the Zigbee side I just switched off my Hue Bridge and replaced with deConz and a ConBee II running on a Docker container on my Synology.
For my experience z-wave is more stable (unless your controller fails) and I never lost any device or find them unreachable (lucky me!). I cannot say the same for ZigBee. I’m not a guru, but configurations and feature looks to me often better than the zigbee equivalent (rolling shutter can report % movements, switches can be configured for buttons or toggles, you can handle single, double and long press, etc).
On the other side zigbee devices are usually less expansive, you can find products from huge names like philips, ikea, Legrand, and for those company you can find good support even from the community side. From the sensors side, Xiami rules with very affordable sensors!
If I had to start from scratch, I would probably go for ZigBee right now.
(Joking, of course). Toggling power is the absolute worst thing you can do with smart bulbs unless they are designed for it (like the Philips Wiz WiFi bulbs). As 
