I was fighting issues with one of my Zigbee thermostats becoming totally unresponsive even though it showed as connected to my C8 hub and that my hub showed it as connected. Other than it being unresponsive to device page commands and dashboard commands sent to it, nothing showed/indicated that it was offline.
On a hunch, I looked into WiFi and Zigbee interference and changed to a different Zigbee channel. Like magic, the thermostat instantly started working again. For the record I went from channel 25 to 15, so as not to conflict with WiFi access points on channels 6 and 11.
This may not be your issue, but you should seriously consider checking and possibly changing your Zigbee channel on your hub.
I don't see any errors in the hub and I don't see it going offline. I tried switching the channels. I've gone through a few channels: 11, 15, 20, 25 and none of them seem to make a difference. I'm not sure what else to try at this point.
You have a very similar mix of Zigbee devices as I have on my production hub with the exception of the peanut plugs. I never had good experience running Zigbee on channel 25. I would bump it down to channel 20-24. Also, can you remove the peanut plug(s) from your environment at least temporarily, then Shut down your hub and unplug it for 30 min before plugging it back on?
Last but not least, one of your APs is on top of your Zigbee, any way you can change them to channel 1 & 6?
I removed all of my peanut plugs and replaced them with Innr Zigbee Smart Plugs. This was a few months ago.
Yesterday I moved my Wifi APs to channel 1 and 6 so they're as far away as possible from channel 25. Here's what the wifi layout looks like. There's a lot of overlaps everywhere so I'm not sure what the ideal channel would be. I'll try changing the channel to 24.
I don't have experience with those either, but assuming the lack of Zigbee incidents in environments that run those outlets, is a good indicator that they should be fine. However, your symptoms as described, point to weak devices/mesh, thus taking those out all together might be your next step.
But both my zigbee meshes are fine. One is on channel 25 with 82 devices. The other is on channel 20 with 40 devices.
Because of the very high WiFi "pollution" around my house, I decided to have a very high ratio of repeaters to end-devices. One the channel 25 mesh I have 1 repeater for every 4 end-devices. On the channel 20 mesh, I have more repeaters than end-devices.
Most of my repeaters have "over-lapping zones" in the sense that if a particular repeater is drowned out by noise, the end-device jumps to another repeater by itself. I have an Xbee3 and I have seen devices change the repeater they use within the same day.
What channel width are you using for your 2.4GHz WiFi access points? Please make sure to use 20MHz channel width for your 2.4GHz WiFi APs. This is actually necessary to create the RF Quiet Zones needed to avoid Zigbee RF interference.
Thank you for chiming in on some possibly solutions.
@aaiyar I currently have 18 hardwire Jasco Zigbee Dimmers (43080 and 43076) and 11 switches (45076 and 45856) out of 42 total devices, spread throughout the house. I think I have a lot of overlap in repeaters.
@ogiewon and @rlithgow1 My wifi is set to 20hz, I use 2x Unifi AP pros set to high power on fixed channels so that they don't switch around. I tried channel 25 zigbee and the issue is the same.
The most interesting part is that if I change the zigbee channel, a few minutes after the zigbee connections are made, they work great for ~24 hours and after that some of them stop responding. So every time I change the channel, I get hopeful that things work and then disappointed a few days later.
You are likely causing issues by using overlapping WiFi channels. With 2 APs, you should be using channels 1, 6 or 11.
Also, if you are fully using Unifi, run an RF scan to see what channels are in use around you. If you aren't using Unifi, you can use something like inSSIDer to do similar.
You want your APs to use channels that don't overlap with each other and with other APs around you.
What are your wall-boxes made of? FWIW, I have only one Jasco Zigbee Dimmer, and it works poorly as a repeater. It is in a blue PVC old-work wall-box. It shows up as a bad neighbor in the zigbee graph.
One my Channel 20 zigbee network, I primarily rely on Iris V2 outlets as repeaters, with one Sonoff USB repeater. On the Channel 25 network, I have TuYa USB repeaters.
You are in a tough predicament. Have you tried inducing zigbee panic mode? I don't think there's much to lose in attempting it. I would also recommend dialing back the radios in your Ubiquiti APs.
