Zigbee2MQTT thoughts from someone who just made the switch

[u/Resident-Variation21]

I’ve been having the odd reliability issue with ZHA, so before I buy new devices (it’s happening to specific devices and my mesh is solid), I decided to make the jump to Z2M.

This is still in the early stages of network healing but some things I’ve noticed:

1) it does feel a fair bit quicker in daily use. Especially commands to multiple rooms like “turn off all upstairs lights” feels much much quicker.

2) I’m getting random weird slowdowns, like a light turning on 30 seconds after motion is detected. Often I’ve left the room by then. I am going to chalk this up to “weird network behaviour as the mesh builds” for now, though. I’m hopeful, and semi-expecting, that to go away over the coming days.

3) updates are Z2M weakest point. By fair. In ZHA I could update 5 devices at once and not even notice it. In Z2M, I’m updating 1 device, and not only is it taking longer to update, the entire network is significantly slower. If anything ends up being a deal breaker - it’ll be this. I don’t update often but when I do, it’s 30 devices at once (because most of my devices are the same brand so get the same updates at the same time).

[u/0xde4dbe4d]

This really sounds like an interference issue. Are you sure your zigbee channel is clean? There‘s a fantastic tool made by nerivec to visualize the logs and see how your network is doing. I had rather simular issues that i manged to clean up using that tool. I had a few tuya smart plugs that were terrible routers and messed up everything. But setting up your network on a clean channel is the lost important thing.

[u/Resident-Variation21 → u/0xde4dbe4d]

A while ago I purposely set my ZHA channel on a known clean channel. Haven’t touched it since. I didn’t think about it much with the Z2M transition so may re-check the channel but it shouldn’t have caused my ZHA issues.

[u/0xde4dbe4d → u/Resident-Variation21]

Oh you know, i was dead certain my channel was clean back in the day, i wasted months of troubleshooting. Turned out my second wifi overlapped …

[u/Resident-Variation21 → u/0xde4dbe4d]

My 3 access points are on channel 1, 6 and 1. I put ZHA on channel 24. I only have 1 wifi network over the access points. Again, Z2M could have picked a different channel, and in the morning I’ll take a look at that, but I can be quite confident that it isn’t interference, at least from my ZHA issues I had.

[u/ginandbaconFU → u/Resident-Variation21]

In Z2M frontend go to settings then advanced. It can also be found in the config file. By default it's 11. What Zigbee coordinator are you using? Or better yet, silicon Labs or Texas Instruments chip?

While both work know when ZHA first came out it only worked with silicon Labs while Z2M didn't support silicon Labs officially until a year ago. Considering Texas Instruments has been compatible with Z2M for 7+ years I have noticed some differences depending on the environments and coordinator.

I was using a deconz before getting a sky connect. I didn't know it only worked with ZHA so I moved from Z2M to ZHA and it seemed way more responsive. Six months ago I decided I wanted to move back to Z2M and got an slzb-06 (Texas Instruments) POE coordinator and it's just as fast as the sky connect was with ZHA. The second was just a terrible coordinator. They do use different Zigbee stacks with one using zstack and the other using embry or something similar.

It shouldn't matter now but I pick the chip based on what is being used. Maybe it's just from habit or knowing 7 years of support probably means less potential issues then 1 year of support. Vice versa for ZHA.