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?
Ironically I did those:
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.
ZigBee 15 would probably be your best bet, but I believe there are devices that may have issues there.
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.
What are the best ways to debug this mesh?
Thoughts? I posted some details here:
Any other thoughts here? I’m out of ideas to try
My WiFi environment is a lot noisier than yours:
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.
Aside from the 20mhz, drop your wifi channel to 6 or below and raise zigbee to 25
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.
I also use unifi ap's. Like I said, keep them below 6 and your Zigbee 20 or 25 and you'll be happier
What channels are you using? I'm trying 1 and 3 right now to see if it helps. Do you happen to have any GE/Jasco devices?
I use 1-5 and have about 60+ zigbee devices. Some ge/jasco
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.
@jkudave yeah agreed, I wanted to test to see if this fixes the issue and so far it has not.
@aaiyar the wall boxes are blue PVC old-work wall-box like yours. I have so many of these that changing to another brand would be really painful.
I don't know if adding a bunch of other repeaters would fix this issue or make it worse. Any thoughts on what to try next?
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.
yeah I've done that many times with turning the Hubitat off for 20 minutes or even using the network rebuild feature in c8 system.
Right now the radios are on channel 1 and 3 and Zigbee is on channel 20. I don't use too many 2.4 Ghz devices, while I'm testing I can keep it this way and it shouldn't have any interference.
Your issues sure seem like classic symptoms of Zigbee operating under heavy interference (slowdowns due to retries at the MAC layer).
They don't have a parent/child relationship, but you'll see those kind of route table entries ( 'XYZ nnnn via XYZ nnnn' ) when the hub is trying to send a message to a device that is also one of its neighbor routers.... the fact that it is encountering delays even when talking to a device that should be a direct single hop route seems to corroborate the scenario of retries/delays resulting from interference.
Since you've tried changing Zigbee channels, maybe consider the location of the C-5 itself relative to your wifi router/AP's. It's often recommended (as Control4 Zigbee Best Practices Guide points out) to avoid locating the Zigbee hub near wifi radios ('near' being within a few meters) to avoid potential side lobe interference; it's very directional but might be significant even when non-overlapping channels are selected.
I say 'might' because I violate this guideline in my own setup without issues (my C-3 is within a meter of my router); yet I have seen its effects first-hand when helping troubleshoot a friend's SmartThings setup.
Download the Hubitat app
