Thought I'd drop this in here - for the newer users who visit. (This is a lounge post, I'm not looking for help).
In the last two weeks I've had odd and strange things happening. Devices not working, automation's failing and just an all-around malaise with my home.
Problem Solved. I'm guessing others may stumble as well - so I thought I'd post a quick idea to tickle those searching the Google as the forum is indexed :).
The problem I began having occurred due to multiple hubs. I've been writing drivers for Home Assistant and had recently loaded HA on my SynologyNAS. Building ZMQTT to work with some of the difficult devices I purchased from a HE user who gave me a fantastic deal. Anyways. Home Assistant came to life by adding a necessary USB Zigbee Dongle Antennae. What I missed was it has an 'auto join' device feature as it acts like a hub. duh.
Because I was also wiring Enbrighten in-wall switches, I had been tossing circuit breakers as needed. I had even bounced (turned off then back on) my office on multiple occasions, which of course requires shutting down my servers/machines and HE Hubs.
All this up and down and power off / on caused some devices to drop off my HE network, and ... the Home Assistant politely picked them up. Next thing I know devices were going odd, I would re-pair them but they had problems reconnecting to my HE - the HA was soooo much faster to join devices!
What gave this all away, was I needed to look at the MQTTT connected device in HA, and there were 7 devices! Mind blown.
Took a bit to clean up - I deleted the wayward devices from HA first. (HA has a reallly nice feature you can 'dont let this device join back' but I literally want control over exactly what was joining so I disabled the join function completely). Then - re-paired the devices back to HE, which all of a sudden went smoothly... (I wonder why!) Once I did that, my problems ended immediately. As a bonus, I even identified 2 motion sensors I had confused their names (swapped names incorrectly) and fixed another plaguing problem!
Lesson: If you have multiple Hubs - be sure to have control over which hub you are joining!
