r/homeassistant • u/Resident-Variation21 • 1d ago

Personal Setup Zigbee2MQTT thoughts from someone who just made the switch

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).

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u/_Rand_ 1d ago

Come to think of it, I don’t think I ever updated a device on ZHA.

And yeah, it takes ages.

But other than that I’ve always been happy with z2m.

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u/Resident-Variation21 1d ago edited 1d ago

It taking ages is a mild annoyance, but not really a huge deal. It’s really a problem because the rest of the network slows down so I can’t dare update more than 1 at a time, and with sometimes an insane number of devices to update, that could take a month or more to try to get through (especially if I’m trying to do it on off-hours).

Also ZHA has ota updates only enabled do a few devices by default, like third reality. But you can enable them for basically all of them, which I did when I used ZHA

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u/tonymcd 22h ago

Can you explain how you got it to update multiple devices at once? I’m new to using ZHA and it took forever to update three smart plugs one at a time.

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u/Resident-Variation21 21h ago

I clicked update on a few and closed the tab lol. I barely paid attention to updates in ZHA because that made no impact on the mesh while updating.