Indeed, it could be that I have a channel interference issue that makes my network stop working for a short period.
It works for days or weeks without problems, so I’m certain that I don’t have some background continuous disturbance that’s blocking everything.
But in the event of a failure, my observation is that the self recovery does not work in practice.
Part of my job involves EMC testing where we deliberately subject things to interference to see what they do. For immunity testing there are 3 possible criteria for the item being tested:
-A: keeps working during the test
-B: stops working during the test but self recovers afterwards
-C: stops working during the test and needs user intervention to recover
I thought zigbee was supposed to be B. But in practice for me it’s C.
So for a moment, please ignore interference. Let’s assume something disturbed my network and now that disturbance has gone. Now I’m expecting the zigbee mesh to self heal and find a new route, for it to re-find its routers. But it doesn’t. It sits there for days in a broken state, until I do one of the above interventions. Then it immediately works.
My conclusion: the self-healing feature is broken (in my combination of coordinator+devices+ZHA+HA) and needs fixing, regardless of what anyone says about interference.
So my feeling is - to get a permanent reliable solution, I should look at what should be happening during self healing, and try to work out why that’s not happening. To me this has almost nothing to do with 2.4GHz channels.