Hi!
Remember this video where I explained the
differences between deCONZ, Zigbee2MQTT, and ZHA in Home Assistant? Well, I
migrated from deCONZ to Zigbee2MQTT using my Conbee 2 stick and I’m not happy at
all! Let me tell you why in this video!
I bought a Conbee 2 stick a few years ago. At
the time, I had linked this in Home Assistant using the “deCONZ” add-on that you can download
from the add-on store. This worked very well. My lamps responded quickly and all devices I have
are supported by them. See this video on how to install deCONZ. The only thing I couldn’t do so
easily was to update the firmware of my devices. I then decided to make a comparison between ZHA,
Zigbee2MQTT, and deCONZ in this video. If you want to know the pros and cons of these three systems,
you should definitely watch that video!
After doing that research, I decided to take the
plunge and switch to Zigbee2MQTT altogether.
I wish I had never done that…
If you want to switch from one system to another, you have to do quite a bit. Since
I didn’t have a second stick at my disposal at the time and I was very satisfied with my Conbee
2 stick, I wanted to transfer everything in one go. It is not possible to run both deCONZ,
Zigbee2MQTT, and ZHA via the same stick.
These were the steps I had to
take to transfer everything:
I had to pair all my Zigbee
devices in Zigbee2MQTT again.
Then I had to give all those devices the
exact same entity_ids they had in deCONZ.
Then I had to go through all my
dashboards to see if the devices and their entities were still displayed properly. And it turned pout that I had to make some
changes here and there in the dashboards.
And then I also had to go
through all my automations, scripts and scenes to see if they still worked.
In the end, it took me about two weeks to get everything back to the way it was before
I switched from deCONZ to Zigbee2MQTT.
So I was happy! Right? Well
no, then the drama started…
What struck me most was that my lamps
reacted a lot slower. Especially the lamps that I had put in light groups in
Home Assistant reacted unreliably.
For your info, my production environment is
a Home Assistant Blue that should just have more than enough capacity for my house.
Sometimes some lights wouldn’t turn on or off when I tried to switch a light group.
Sometimes lamps would not respond when motion was detected by a motion sensor or when I pressed
a button. The latter only happened occasionally, but lamps in a Home Assistant Light Group were a
real drama. A real drama. It was such a drama.
Well, then I decided to put those lamps in a
Zigbee2MQTT group. I preferred not to do that, but it seemed the only solution at that time.
When I started using Zigbee2MQTT groups, my lamps responded better when I controlled
such a group, but sometimes there were still lamps that did not respond well.
The most annoying thing, for me, was that I now had to create groups in Zigbee2MQTT and adjust
all my automations, scripts, and dashboards again. Well, finally, I found a smarter way by
populating my Home Assistant groups with groups from Zigbee2MQTT. Then I would at least no
longer have to adjust my dashboards, automations, and scripts. But then again, now I had groups
from Zigbee2MQTT in groups in Home Assistant.
That felt kinda, ehhh, meh.
But I didn’t really want to go back to my
old install now. And now I was able to update the firmware of my devices
over the air, so I liked that part.
Until I shot this video from last week about
scenes in Home Assistant. Man, I’ve been fighting a lot with scenes in Home Assistant in combination
with my Conbee 2 stick and Zigbee2MQTT. Really, at about 50 percent of the time, my lights
were unresponsive, slow, or displaying the wrong colors. It was a complete disaster if I wanted to
control single lamps that were part of a group. When I controlled the Light Groups from
Zigbee2MQTT instead, things got better, but every now and then some lamps still did not work.
This time I had several sticks at my disposal and I thought it would be a good idea to try out
the latest Sonoff Zigbee 3.0 USB Dongle Plus ZBDongle-E. Now I already had Zigbee2MQTT
running on my production environment, so I couldn’t try that new stick with
Zigbee2MQTT on my production environment. So I decided to test that stick with ZHA first.
When I connected the new Sonoff stick to my Home Assistant server, I was able to
install it with ZHA without any problem. That was done according to the same procedure as
I show in this video here. Pairing a few lamps, Aqara motion sensors, and an Ikea Tradfri remote
went without any problems. But now came the test! I made some scenes with single lamps to see if
they would work properly. So I didn’t use groups as the ultimate test! And guess what happened…
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The lamps responded super fast and correctly
every time! Occasionally there was a lamp that reacted a little slower than the other lamps, but
in the end, the lamp did respond in the right way. What a relief! Everything
responded the way I wanted it to. In the end, I replaced the individual lamps
with the groups I made in Home Assistant.
Anyway, that’s still not a good comparison, of
course, because I was testing with ZHA right now. To make sure that the problem lies in the
combination of the Conbee 2 stick and deCONZ, I also had to do a test with Zigbee2MQTT and the
new Sonoff Zigbee 3.0 USB Dongle Plus ZBDongle-E.
So I decided to put Zigbee2MQTT on
my test environment and connect the new Sonoff stick to it. Of course, that
was not as easy as installing ZHA. It turned out that for this new stick I had
to do some extra things to get it working in Zigbee2MQTT. In next week’s video
I’ll show you how to get the new Sonoff Zigbee 3.0 USB Dongle Plus ZBDongle-E
working perfectly in Home Assistant, so if you haven’t subscribed to my channel yet,
please do, so you won’t miss that video!
When I had this stick running on Home Assistant,
I linked the same lamps to my test environment and created new scenes that called these
lamps via Zigbee2MQTT. And guess what…..
The lamps responded quickly and
even without using Zigbee2MQTT’s light groups they responded correctly.
My conclusion is that the Conbee 2 stick is not reliable enough for Zigbee2MQTT. At least,
not for me. Fortunately, the new Sonoff stick does not cost that much. I have put a link in the
description of this video where you can buy it. I get a small affiliate fee for it
if you buy it through that link, without it costing you extra money. This way you
support me a little for creating this video.
And now some tips if you’d like to
migrate from deCONZ to Zigbee2MQTT or from ZHA to Zigbee2MQTT or vice versa.
My first tip is: If you have a Conbee 2 stick, stick with deCONZ. This stick
works best with deCONZ. Period!
My second tip is: Buy a second stick so
you can run both systems side by side and migrate step by step. That will save you a
lot of hassle with the rest of your family.
And then tip 3: If you already have groups
in Home Assistant, register your Zigbee2MQTT groups in the Home Assistant groups so that
you don’t have to adjust your dashboards, automations, and scripts afterward
I hope this video helped you and I want to thank everyone who has supported me in
making these videos and tutorials so far. I could never have done this without you.
Thank you! If you also want to support me, see how you can do that in the description of
this video. With that, you make it possible that I can continue to make these videos for you.
Oh, don’t forget to give this video a thumbs up, subscribe to my channel, and
hit the notification bell.
I will see you soon!
Bye bye!
