In-house range problems Zigbee

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Hi, I have been using Hubitat for over a year now with succes. Last month I moved from an appartement of 80m2 to a new house with 3 floors. It is a newly build house of 150m2 and it has been very well isolated with for example triple glass throughout the house.

For Wi-Fi I use a mesh network TP-Link Deco M9 Plus, one on each floor. Hubitat sits where my internet connection comes in, in the fuse box on the ground floor. Wi-fi connection is all good in the house, you do however can tell when you walk from floor to floor that a connection to another mesh point is made.

I have +/- 20 Philips Hue lights and 8 Aqara motion sensors. On the ground floor they all work fine. Problem starts on the first floor, where my motion sensor in my bedroom does only work when placed right besides the door. On the second floor my Hue lights work well but my sensors don't.

I would like to place window break sensors but at this point I really can't use them because of the bad range. Can anyone tell me what I can do to fix this problem?

Cheers,

Michael

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Welcome to HE! :partying_face:

For every 6, or so battery devices, you should install a mains power repeater. Here is the HE KB about building a solid Zigbee network. Be sure to add a repeater "inside the network", before trying to "extend the network" too far.

I just got a few of these yesterday to boost my Zigbee mesh. After adding 40 iris battery sensors with the deal @ogiewon posted here, I am also having an issue with some delays, device falling off. I have not used those repeaters yet, but there is also a post about good zigbee plug repeaters, and more here.

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Thanks! I thought that the zigbee devices would make a mesh on itself. Now I understand that battery powered devices will not..

I will look for a zigbee repeater that will hopefully take care of this, thanks for the advice!

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don't the deco m9 plus have 2 ports on it? could you move the hub to the middle floor and connect it to the deco?

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Yes they do, I've tried that but connection is still lost in a couple of rooms.
I am going to try and place Ikea TRÅDFRI smart plugs/ repeaters and see if that works.

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The tradfri plugs are:

  1. big
  2. ugly
  3. work "okay". According to my xbee scan, they have a weak signal/antenna. Some people here love them, mine fell off too often and I returned both of them(1 year return at Ikea).
    Strong repeaters are the samsung 2018 zigbee plugs, found st samsung or ebay (
    GP-U999SJVLDAA).
    The tradfri cheap enough to try, you could get ~3 for the price of 1 samsung plug, but the samsung has power monitoring if that's important to you.

Wait, even with hub in center of house zigbee is lost ? I'd look for interference, wifi zigbee channel overlap or 2.4ghz cordless phone.