As I migrate from SmartThings I'm growing concerned that the Zigbee stack on Hubitat is fragile. Four Zibee devices have dropped off today; 1 SmartPlug, 2 Iris Motion Sensors, and 1 Iris Contact Sensor. This is troubling to me because I never had Zigbee devices drop off of SmartThings, unless of course the batteries died. In each of the 4 cases I had to pull the battery and reset the device while in pairing mode.
There is no correlation in times, they all happened at random times during the day. According to a WiFi scanner, it's not WiFi inteference either. The hub is using channel 21, all 4 nodes of my Eero system are using WiFi channel 1, my Arlo's using channel 1 and channel 3 for each base, and my tenant's WiFi is on channel 5. None of these overlap significantly with Zigbee channel 21.
Has anyone else experienced a high rate of dropped devices??
I am an early adopter and haven’t experienced any dropped devices. I have 150 total devices, 44 are zigbee and mostly water sensors. I have Iris plus throughout my home as repeaters and recently an XBee.
Support may be able to help you figure it out. Zigbee have specific recommendations by staff. I'm sure if you submit a support ticket they'll take a deeper look into your logs and see what may be causing the drop if anything is apparent. They're pretty good about it. I recommend submitting a ticket to support@hubitat.com and get some feedback from them.
I have 8 iris motions, 2 contact sensors and 6 smart plugs and they have been rock solid for months. Zigbee channel 24 and also use eeros. As @april.brandt mentioned, you should probably reach out to support for guidance.
This could have a lot of causes and is difficult to pin down without further information & investigation.
You mention SmartThings.. is it still powered up? which channel is that on?
What distance are the devices from the hub?
Any repeaters between the devices and the hub?
How close is the hub to ST (if on) and any wireless access point or router?
Are all the devices in a particular area in the home? (E.g. all in one room)
Have you recently added a new zigbee device?
Any new device which has the ability to repeat?
Is there anything showing in the ‘previous’ logs page?
Have you added any new apps recently?
These are the sort of questions support will ask you.
The internal logs do not always show a cause for something like this.
Edit: I’m sorry this sounds like a bit of a ‘grilling’ but with more information comes more suggestions & help
Like Andy said...ST is huge PITA with Zigbee especially if you did not remove the device properly from ST. I have noticed that if I turn my ST hub on my entire Zigbee mesh becomes unreliable. I believe this is due to the ST attempting to join the mesh, take control OR is just that a crappy implementation of Zigbee. I did turn off insecure join on the ST and that helped but still saw delays.
I had my ST hub on for months with HE and didn’t experience any issues though they were different channels. I had manually deleted all Zigbee devices from the IDE after moving everything to HE - this was back in March. My ST hub has since been turned off around Thanksgiving.
I'm having a similar issue. Random zigbee devices (usually a bulb) drop off and will not rejoin until I reboot the HE hub, at which point everything works again. This is getting pretty frustrating.
Anyone else have this problem? Why doesn't the Hubitat repair its zigbee network without a reboot?
What kind of Zigbee devices specifically? You say "usually a bulb". What kind of bulbs do you have connected? How many devices? How many of your devices are repeaters? When a bulb drops off the mesh, how far is it from your hub?
It's in the spec and that's what the Hubitat follows. That same goes for most other home automation hubs that utilize the ZHA profile. It's not like Z-Wave where you can command a mesh repair.
The bulb that drops off is usually a tradfri or a lightify bulb. I have at least 1 repeater (not counting bulbs) in every room of the house. Bulb that drops off seems random, from one in the room next to the hub, to one downstairs (hub is upstairs), to one outside.
Well Smartthings seemed pretty stable with this same setup. But maybe I need to mess with the repeaters (iris plugs) and see if I can get it more stable now that everything is on hubitat.
Most likely this is your culprit. Lightify/OSRAM bulbs are HORRIBLE repeaters and will foul up a mesh in no time. Especially if you have a lot of devices. The chattier the mesh, the more issues you are going to run into. I'd try to remove them (and replace them with either Sengleds, Ikea Tradfris, Yeelights, etc) and then give your setup a day or two to rebuild the mesh (depending on how many Zigbee devices you have).
The Ikea bulbs shouldn't be causing any issues. I have a ton of Ikea Trafri lights right now (18 E26 1000lm, 11 GU10 400lm, and 4 Drivers(10w/30w) and my mesh is extremely stable. One thing you can do to rule out the Tradfri (and is just a good practice anyhow), is to get a Tradfri hub and update the firmware on your bulbs. It's a pain and something that I do roughly every 6 months, but to me, worth the hassle.
SmartThings purposely slowed down traffic to Zigbee devices if you had OSRAM/Lightify bulbs on your mesh. That was their "fix" and a stupid one at that as it fooled people into thinking they had a stable mesh when in reality, it was merely the hub slowing traffic down to accommodate for bad repeaters. Hubitat has done no such thing (and hopefully never do).
I agree - I never had so many devices drop from the Zigbee mesh. It never did on ST.. Light bulbs are common, but so are other devices. I have been complaining about this for a long time and they always want me to send pics, or screen shots and I am just too busy to give them all my stats but one of these days when I can sit down and do that I will try. I like the local system and need that so its a tradeoff and a matter of being patient.. I do believe they will get this one day. I think the designers need to strengthen the hub otherwise, this is a novelty item.. it is not very stable for a large networks with someone who has the potential reach 100 devices with both Zigbee and Zwave.
Why should a hub engineer solve the problems of a faulty device? And yes I get the remarks about ST doing it all without problems. But that doesn't mean it's a good way to go. Maybe ST wasn't really concerned about the quality of service and therefore just opened it's door to every faulty device. HE isn't like that and from my understanding is not going to change that either (and frankly I'm glad they don't). I rather have HE be clear about what to expect from those devices instead of having everything setup and having the most odd problems after a random period.
I have over 200 devices, on two hubs, one for all bulbs and another one for everything else, including automations.
HE scales to 100 devices easily if everything on it is well behaved...
Good to know -- I do not understand the constant dropping of so many devices daily that support the mesh -- most are wall switches (zwave) and higher quality devices for the plugs for zigbee. I have 20 SYLVANIA SMART wall plugs that are zigbee that span 2000 sq ft in a Tri Level Home. It's a very strong mesh..so I have not read where the smart plugs are an issue.. If I had the same devices on a different Hub and did not have the drops with that brand, what other issues should I be looking to? Is there a way to visualize the mesh?
Maybe I need 2 Hubs? That is a reasonable consideration... but I have not thought about that and how to expand the network,...assuming that is the end result.
One other question -- what has been the consensus on the Iris Plugs? Do they work well with the mesh? -- Has it been ok to to mix them with other brands?
Was you other hub on a different zigbee channel? Have you looked at interference from Bluetooth and wifi for the zigbee mesh?
Also you are talking about z-wave devices and zigbee. Can you post a complete summary of devices you have and the protocol they use? And tell us which devices dropping of?
