I’ve been using Zigbee for a couple of years
now in two different houses that I have rented. For the most part I’ve never had any reliability
or performance issues, until recently. As I got up to around 60 different zigbee
devices connected to my network… because I’m a nerd and it’s fun to play with new
sensors and lights when they come available… things started to get flaky. Lights would no longer turn on instantly when
my PIR sensors detected motion. I’d ask Google to turn off the lights in
a room, and all but one of them would turn off. It really started to get annoying and I began
researching what I could do to make this setup more reliable. After a few months of testing different things
I can now share with you the three main improvements I made to create a truly rock solid Zigbee
network. I personally use Zigbee with Home Assistant
and the Zigbee2MQTT integration. But these steps that I’m going to share
will improve any Zigbee network with any integration. The first thing I did to improve performance
and reliability was upgrade my Zigbee USB dongle. When I first started out with Zigbee I bought
my USB dongle on Amazon, and it was based on the Texas Instruments CC2531 chipset. It worked perfectly well out of the box in
my small apartment and was compatible with Zigbee2MQTT, my 5 or so smart lights and three
temperature sensors. When I moved to a slightly bigger house, it
had a few issues with range and some of my sensors that were far away stopped reporting
information and wouldn’t work properly. I fixed this by adding a few smart light bulbs
into my network which acted as routers, but I’ll touch a bit more on that later. As my Zigbee network grew, I found that my
USB coordinator would stop responding at all every couple of weeks, and you’d have to
stop Zigbee2MQTT, pull out the dongle, plug it back in and restart it before it would
start working again. I also noticed that it became harder to pair
new devices, as they just wouldn’t get detected. I embarrassingly learned that the CC2531 chipset
that my USB dongle was based on was an older model, and that most people now recommend
you use a newer version instead which supports larger Zigbee networks and has better support
from the community. The recommended models now use the newer CC2652
chipset and there are a lot of different Zigbee USB sticks on the market that use this hardware. I’ve had great results with Slaesh’s stick,
as well as this Sonoff Zigbee 3.0 USB Dongle Plus. For full disclosure, Sonoff offered to send
me this USB stick for free to test as they’d seen my previous Zigbee videos. I agreed to this as I use a lot of Sonoff
devices in my network and they tend to be pretty reliable, even if they often feel cheaply
made. They are incredible value for money though
- this USB stick is only $10.99, is based on the new chipset and supports Zigbee 3.0
devices. I’ve been using it for a couple of weeks
now and have been really happy with it. It performs better than my existing CC2531
stick, which actually cost me more than the Sonoff is currently selling for. The Sonoff looks just like any other Zigbee
USB dongle, and comes with the coordinator firmware pre-installed on it so it should
work perfectly out of the box. In the box you get the USB stick itself, and
an external antenna. It’s quite large in size compared to my
other Zigbee Coordinators, but that shouldn’t really matter as you should always connect
your Zigbee stick to your Home Assistant device using a USB extension cable. This is another tip to improve your Zigbee
reliability and performance. A Zigbee USB stick is essentially a radio
transmitter and receiver, which is susceptible to radio interference. If you connect your stick directly into the
USB port of the device running Home Assistant, like this raspberry pi, there could be interference
from the onboard Wifi or Bluetooth chips. Even though this Sonoff coordinator comes
with an aluminium housing to reduce signal interference, I still think it’s best to
use a 1 or 2m USB cable to separate the device away from anything that could cause this kind
of radio interference, like a Wireless Access Point or Bluetooth keyboard. The Sonoff Zigbee 3.0 USB Dongle Plus is compatible
with both ZHA and Zigbee2MQTT. If you’re setting up a new Zigbee network
from scratch you can just follow the guides available online and the instructions are
the same regardless of which model you use. I’ve put a link in the description below
to a video I did on how to set up Zigbee with Home Assistant using ZHA. If you’re replacing your old USB coordinator
with a more powerful one on an existing Zigbee network it gets a little more complicated. You’ll need to either re-create your Zigbee
network from scratch, which can be really painful, or you can migrate your devices from
one USB stick to another. There’s a guy called Lewis, who has a great
YouTube channel called Everything Smart Home, and he made an excellent video that shows
you how to migrate from one Zigbee USB stick to another without having to re-pair your
lights and sensors. I personally decided to use this opportunity
to make some extra improvements to my Zigbee network, which required re-pairing all my
devices, so I didn’t bother migrating anything. But if you’re looking to just replace your
old USB Zigbee Coordinator with the Sonoff or any other more powerful dongle, then I
suggest you check out Lewis’s video, which I’ve linked in the description below. It will save you a lot of time! For some people, replacing the USB coordinator
will be enough to make their network more stable. But if you’re like me you probably didn’t
really plan your Zigbee network in any great detail, and just started pairing devices willy
nilly as you bought them, moved them around your house and didn’t factor in anything
like Router Placement or 2.4Ghz Wifi Interference. Since I’d already mentally prepared myself
about having to re-pair 60 Zigbee devices and fix all my automations I thought I’d
make all the improvements that I researched in one hit over a weekend. The second improvement I made was to ensure
that my Wifi network was on a different set of channels to my Zigbee network to prevent
radio interference. Zigbee and some Wifi networks both work on
the same set of radio frequencies, which is the 2.4 Ghz range. This radio frequency is then broken up into
separate channels, much like how radio stations and TV channels used to work. If you have a lot of Wifi devices, and Zigbee
devices all near each other, and they are set up to use overlapping radio channels,
then there is a chance that they may fight for airtime and signals could get lost or
delayed. It’s a lot like trying to communicate with
someone in a crowded room where everyone is talking at once. To prevent this you can set your Wifi network
up to use one set of channels, and your Zigbee network up to use a different channel that
is not overlapping the same frequency. Changing your Zigbee channel usually requires
you to re-pair your devices. I figured I may as well do this as I had planned
to re-pair them anyway. I’ve linked to this website in the description
below which shows you which Zigbee channels overlap with which 2.4 Ghz WiFi channels,
and provides a bit more information about how this all works. I decided to set up my Zigbee network on Channel
11, which is the lowest number channel. You can set this in both ZHA or Zigbee2MQTT,
but do be aware that you will probably have to re-pair your devices if you do this. I then went to my Wifi settings and excluded
the overlapping channels to make sure that my Wireless devices used the higher channels,
and hopefully didn’t clash with each other. Also be aware that if you live in a city or
crowded apartment building that your neighbours wifi may also interfere with both your WiFi
and Zigbee networks. There are many Wifi Analyser type apps you
can get on your smart phone that check all the wireless networks in your area and tell
you which channels are the most popular and which ones might be less crowded. If you have a different 2.4 Ghz and 5 Ghz
Wifi network in your home, then I suggest you connect as many devices with the 5 Ghz
network as you can. Most new devices support 5 Ghz, and not only
is it faster, but it also doesn’t interfere with the Zigbee network. Sadly older or cheaper Wifi devices, like
most WiFi Home Automation equipment doesn’t yet support 5 Ghz. The third improvement I made to improve my
Zigbee network reliability and performance is to create a solid mesh network. If you’re not aware, permanently hard wired
Zigbee devices, such as light bulbs and smart switches have the ability to act as Zigbee
Routers, which can pass Zigbee signals through them. This means that you can pair a battery powered
sensor near a Zigbee lightbulb, and the light bulb can pass that signal onwards to your
USB coordinator. It could also pass it to another router, which
means you can extend your network well beyond the distance limitations of your USB coordinator
if you have a big house or thick walls. Routers also allow you to add more devices
to your network than your coordinator supports by default, because each device is talking
to a router rather than the main coordinator. I explain this in a bit more detail in my
What Is Zigbee video, which I’ve linked in the description below. I wanted to make sure that my routers were
correctly placed and paired so that my Zigbee mesh network is as robust as possible. This required a bit of pre-planning about
where I would place my smart light bulbs and battery powered sensors. I also had to make sure that I paired them
in the right order to build out this network properly. Here’s the theory. A Zigbee USB coordinator, like the Sonoff,
can support about 20 devices talking to it directly. Once it hits that limit, the only way that
you can pair more devices is if one of the existing ones can act as a router. Radio signals generally emit outwards in a
sphere… I know, I know, it depends on the antenna
and the gain and all that, but for the purposes of this explanation it’s good enough…
you’ll get better results if you place your Home Assistant server with your USB coordinator
attached somewhere in the middle of your house. If you put it in the basement, it will probably
not reach to the top floor unless you have routers in between. It will still work, but if you can put it
in the middle somewhere it will probably work better. I then started pairing my hard wired devices,
that would act as routers, first starting from close to my coordinator and then slowly
moving outwards. This way the routers closest to the Coordinator
would pair with the coordinator itself until all 20 slots were taken up. Then the routers that are further away from
the coordinator can pair with the other routers and build up the mesh network. Once I had all my routers paired, I moved
on to the battery powered devices like my temperature and motion sensors. When I paired these devices the first time,
I used to do it near the coordinator in my office and then move them to their final resting
place. This turned out to be a stupid idea because
they would pair with the router or coordinator in my office, and then I would move them out
to the kitchen or wherever and they’d lose connection. I now re-paired the devices in situ, where
I planned to use them, so they would immediately connect to the closest router. This whole process was a massive pain in the
arse and took me several hours over the course of a weekend. But it really has made a big improvement to
the performance and stability of my network. I no longer hear my partner yelling at me
from across the house because the “magic lights didn’t turn on”. Re-pairing all my devices actually gave me
one other benefit as well - and that was the opportunity to re-name them all using a sensible
naming convention and add them all to area’s in Home Assistant. I used to make up names for my sensors and
smart devices on the spot without any sort of plan or system. After two years of this it ended up looking
like a dogs breakfast and I couldn’t remember where “coloured bulb 2” was. Do you use a naming convention with your Home
Assistant devices or entities? I’d love to hear about them in the comments
as I plan on making an entire video dedicated to this topic in future. It would be great to incorporate all your
ideas into this video, and get perspectives other than just Pedram’s… Hi Pedram. The downside to renaming all your devices
is that you have to fix any automations and scripts that rely on these. You’ll also need to recreate any Home Assistant
groups that contain these entities. I just did these slowly over time when I noticed
that a particular automation had stopped working. For me the benefits have outweighed the effort
and I’m really happy with the results. If you thought this video was useful, then
please give it a thumbs up to let me know. If you’re looking to get Zigbee working
on Home Assistant with the Sonoff or another USB dongle, then check out this video here. If you want to know my opinions about whether
ZHA is better than Zigbee2MQTT, then check out this video here. I regularly release videos about Zigbee, Home
Assistant and Home Automations in general, so if that’s your jam then click the subscribe
button and together we’ll make your home smarter.
