I also agree that typically this would be due to a voltage spike/surge -- and initially that's what I thought, so after I lost the first two, I put a fancy Intermatic Surge Suppression system in.
I had initially thought that the Tesla PowerWall and Inverter system between the meter and my Main breaker would act as regulation, but the more I think on the way it's hooked up the more I doubt that, so your point is very well made.
So too, it's also likely that the outlet I located recently was damaged some time ago (e.g when the other two were), and only recently degraded to a state that caused dramatic results on my network.
...and having said that...now I think I need to go check the Intermatic.
It's entirely possible that some device on your network just doesn't play well with the newer Zigbee radio in the C8s. And like you, my devices all ran fine on the C5 an C7 -- I can't explain it. However incompatability is not out of the question at all.
I also suspect a device could be bad for quite a while and not be detected due to mesh configuration, traffic patterns, or even traffic density.
This is a difficult thing to nail down -- I've had periods of many days without any zigbee radio up/down messages, and then out of the blue they show up.
Good luck with your troubleshooting! Let me know if I can help in any way!
Oh Joy. Woke up this morning and the shades didn't go up. Took a look at the hub and the zigbee radio said "initialising". I am pretty sure it used an "s" which I take as a nod to my birth country.
I tried all of the usual - rebooting radio, rebooting hub, nothing. Tried soft reset and before restore the radio would not come up. Finally got a soft reset of the hub to come up and radio online. Restored the backup and it got stuck in a death cycle of rebooting.
At this point I could have done a full reset - but knowing that the radio was likely to cause problems when I had restored and rebuilt everything - I took the C5 out of the shelf.
Restored a backup on the C5, it's up and running with zigbee radio online. Now have to go back around and reconnect the zigbee devices.
My plan now is to setup a spare C7 I have and start moving zigbee devices to it and using it only for zigbee. Then when the C5 has no zigbee devices on it - switching it back to the C8Pro again.
The C8/C8-Pro have definitely been more touchy about Zigbee than Z-Wave for me as well.
You may not need to put yourself through the process of re-joining all of your Zigbee devices to your C5, etc. If you are going to split things up, my somewhat simpler process was to gradually move "troublesome" Zigbee devices from my C8 back to my C7. Basically when a Zigbee device didn't run well on the C8 I would move it back to the C7, share to the C8 via mesh and swap it back into the automations. Over time I moved about 1/3 of my Zigbee devices back to my C7 and ended w/stability on both C7 and C8. Something to consider.
Regarding the "Initialising" state of the Zigbee radio - you can try a shut down, pull power, wait 30s, restart jig to see if that helps. Good luck w/this!
Good point - that does depend on your environment and mix of devices/repeaters. On my C7 I have a SonOff USB Dongle and Iris plugs, Ikea plugs, and Linptech mmWave mains powered sensors. They keep things running smoothly on my C7. If I was starting from scratch and just wanted to add a few repeaters to my C7 I would use the Tiny Tuya USB repeaters and the SonOff USB Dongles as my first choices for repeaters. The Tuya are great in that they are very small/easy to hide. Depending on how many repeaters you have on your C8 you may be able to rob Peter to pay Paul...
Have you tried power cycle by Shutting down hub, then when led turns red unplug the hub for a minute before plugging it back?
That would make no difference, except for the time you'd need to spend to fix everything.
That shouldn't be the solution. Your C-8 Pro is a better hub than C-7. I would try to narrow down what's eating your C-8 Pro. If you need help, please send me a PM and we will look for clues in your hub's engineering log. For certain we would like to learn more about what is causing the C-8 Pro radio to go offline.
i went a little different route.. i put in better repeaters.. (aka zigbee 3.0) the sonoff dongles as mentioned with their own antenna.. and also i put usb ups on them so they stay up during power outages.
and also a couple of the tuya mini dongles as also mentioned and it stabalized my zigbee on my c8..
but the newer c8 zigbee seems to be pickier about what works..
and i have a fairly complex zigbee mesh with 51 devices.. all working well on my c8 pro.
Hi @bobbyD I have been having issues with Zigbee since adding my first C8. I have no doubt that this could be a bad actor in the network but so far I haven't found it.
I already have all of my zwave devices running on two separate C8s. My house is too big and I was able to position these to get nice mesh coverage on all floors.
And I plan to move my zigbee devices one by one from my C5 to my C7. Then connect each device from my C7 back to my C5 using hub mesh. Once I have moved all zigbee devices to the C7 I will backup the C5 and replace it with my C8Pro.
So it will look like the image below.
From everything I read, running on the older zigbee chip is not going to handicap my setup? Thanks.
As I mentioned the house is too big - empty nesters with 5 bed/5 bath house, two family rooms and home theater and three floors.
But remember that I am not using 4 hubs to span the entire house. Two hubs are taking care of Zwave as that was causing me problems. I experienced constant dead spots in coverage no matter where I placed a single hub. So I added a second hub and coverage is great.
The zigbee on a single hub is working throughout the whole house as the mesh here seems to be working ok.
And to be fair - I have a lot more zwave devices than zigbee. I only use zigbee when a zwave alternative isn't readily available.
And all rule processing is on the main hub. So the other hubs are acting as smart antennas.
I always upgrade to the latest hub when it comes out. Partly because I like new stuff, and also because I want to give Hubitat my business so they keep making things bigger and better. So I have hubs on the shelf. And the C8 zigbee challenges first set me down this path as I pulled all z-wave off and out of the way so I could keep messing with the zigbee. But I really need to pull the zigbee off so I can play around with that and not impact my main rules engine. Which is my next step.
The Zigbee radio in the C8 uses Zigbee 3.0 which should be fully backward compatible with Zigbee 1.2. However, there are many devices that claim to be Zigbee 1.2 which do not fully implement the standard. Aqara devices are one such device as are early Iris devices.
After obtaining my C8, I replaced such devices with Zigbee 3.0 sensors.
My Zigbee radio goes offline every a few times a week for a few seconds, but it never seems to bother anything.
this on your new c8? unfort. it can effect things if the timing is correct ... for instance it may miss a report of a switch or light turning on/off and have the device in the wrong state..
one thing you can do as a workaround if that happens is monitor for the shutdown (i do and reboot hub if zigbee stays off for longer than the few secs).. and then do a refresh of those zigbee devices you care about that may be in the wrong state as a result..
here is my rule that senses it if anyone is interested.. i didnt go the next step and add refresh for devices but it would be easy.
Having said that, in my case, i avoided all Aquara devices like the plague, and for Zigbee, at this point i have just a few Hue, Samsung & Sonoff sensors, mostly Motion, and maybe 3 Zigbee buttons left.
All my other Zigbee devices are hard wired, and I'm pretty sure the devices that have plagued my network are likely hard wired.
Given I've been running C4, C5, C7 &C8 hubs and I've never seen a Zigbee Radio bounce up and down like a kid on a pogo stick until recently, I'm inclined to think "bad device" not bad hub. I'm also going to find it. WAF is dependent on reliability, thus bouncing Zigbee Radios are not conducive to WAF.
@bobbyD Has anyone ever looked into temperature? I have this problem from time to time. It is usually due to the hub being stressed for something else. To me, it makes sense that a stressed hub gets hot and the Zigbee chip may just not like higher temperatures.
Is there any way to monitor the hub temperature? I do not see any. With my computer, I can monitor the temperature of my CPU, my GPU, my RAM, my SSDs, and the motherboard chipset, but temperature does not show up in the hub details.
If temperature is a potential issue, will there be even more issues with the C8 Pro hubs since the CPU is much faster?
Yes, but we didn't find a correlation between higher temp and Zigbee going offline since C4 hubs. Most cases were traced to mix of devices causing the problem or, in rare cases a radio malfunction.
