It's dead, Jim. All my devices have stopped working, can't re-pair them

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Starting in late August, my devices stopped responding, one by one. I would go in, re-pair the device, and it would start working again. Then in early September, everything stopped responding at the same time. I have one Hue bulb, five Ikea bulbs of various flavors, two Sengled bulbs, and two Ikea Zigbee repeaters connected to the HE, and usually control everything with Google Home via Nest Hubs and Lenovo Smart Clocks around the house. It's a C-7 hub, running today's 137 firmware.

The HE is on the top floor of a three-storey concrete house, next to a central staircase. The two repeaters are also next to the staircase, one on each of the other floors, to create a sort of corridor of connectivity for the Zigbee network. The HE is in a closet where there also resides a Nest Wifi router.

My system has worked flawlessly for nearly a year, until this little oopsie.

I spent a few hours trying to re-pair all the devices tonight, and most of them failed. It eventually recognized the Sengled bulbs, but none of the Ikea ones. Since the initial pairing with the Hue bulb I haven't been able to re-try, since I don't have any of their other contraptions to reset it with. The two repeaters were eventually paired after several attempts, but neither recognized as what it is - one was "generic Zigbee outlet", and the other was "generic Zigbee device". Even the devices that were able to pair don't respond.

As I sit here writing this I just saw the two Sengled bulbs in the next room turn off and then back on, presumable responding to buttons I pressed on the device page half an hour ago. And now this leads me to wonder if the Ikea bulbs aren't pairing because the HE is so slow their pairing mode times out before the HE finds them.

I've seen posts here about the HE having some kind of massive database problem, and input a secret URL I found to reduce the size of the history. No change. I saw another post about how maybe my Wifi router changed channels and is conflicting with the HE, so I change the Zigbee channel to one at the other end of the list. No change.

Can anyone take a stab at what's going on here? Is my HE broken?

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This is misinformation.

You should download a backup of your hub, do a Soft Reset, and then restore that backup. If that doesn't clear up your issues, then contact support@hubitat.com.

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Simple answer: Unlikely.

Try the Soft Reset as your first step.

Pairing Zigbee over and over is a sign of a low quality mesh, isn't it? If you have the hub, routing through a bulb (Hue or Sengled) and it's not paired, then nothing else that needs the router would reach the hub, right? Therefore, randomly pairing is unlikely to recover.

Again, that sounds like some critical device fell off the mesh. Then nothing beyond that device is reachable, and you started trying to re-pair those... the almost impossible ones. :slight_smile:

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Did you re-pair your devices after doing this?

BTW, all your symptoms strike me as resulting from a less-than-robust zigbee mesh, as also diagnosed by @csteele.

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Thanks everyone for the feedback. Can someone point me to a guide for setting up a robust zigbee mesh? It was flakey before I added the repeaters, but since then it's been great, so I have been working on the presumption that the mesh was healthy. Last night I did the backup/soft reset/restore as suggested, no change. I can't even pair a brand new Ikea bulb right out of the box sitting 20cm from the HE.

I did not re-pair everything after changing the channel, something I wasn't aware was necessary.

Would it make sense to just wipe this thing and start over from scratch with a new mesh, etc?

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Based on details shared, it sounds like your repeaters dropped/or you removed them (as you said earlier that you were able to add them back). If that's the case, your backbone of your mesh was removed creating havoc in your mesh. I don't usually recommend panicking your mesh, but in your case it might be necessary. Have you powered off the hub for 30 min before powering it back - this method has a similar effect as the Z-Wave repair, when the hub comes back online the Zigbee routing tables are rebuilt? Also how many battery Zigbee devices do you have? Sengled are not repeaters, so they count as battery powered devices.

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@AlanInSitges aside from what @bobbyD said, hue bulbs also may be one of your problems. They are ZLL Zigbee bulbs and make bad repeaters and messengers. The sengleds are good as they don't repeat (but you need good repeaters in the mesh) and the ikea bulbs I believe are also ZLL (Someone correct me if im wrong on that). I would put them on their own hub without any other zigbee devices (as most other zigbee devices will be ZHA based) Isolating them on another hubitat or a Hue bridge will certainly help overall mesh issues.

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I'd be glad to, please check out this document:

https://docs.hubitat.com/index.php?title=How_to_Build_a_Solid_Zigbee_Mesh

*the guide mentions powering down for 20 min, for good measure, I would keep it off for 30 min. Will adjust the documentation.

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