My previously perfect zigbee mesh is failing at the edges. I have a couple devices, one a sengled contact and one hue motion sensor that were working fine. Both are on outlying buildings. I have a few Smartthings repeater plugs stationed along the path ot them, and I even added one more. The contact works if I move it closer to the house but fails on the shed door. It previously worked great. It seems to have started failing after one of the hub updates in the last couple weeks.
It's been my experience that a version upgrade rarely has an effect on your mesh, unless it's a zwave firmware update and that's a whole different kettle of fish. However, you could test it by reverting to a previous platform version and see if the problem corrects itself. I use the smart things plugs too and have found them to be reliable repeaters. I suppose it's possible one of them has failed completely, but I wonder if maybe something else in the environment has changed. Have you made any changes to your wifi network recently that might cause interference with your zigbee mesh? Like sticking a wifi repeater in the outbuilding or changing channels? This chart shows the channel overlaps... worth a quick check.
You can also get a sense for the relative strength of your zigbee mesh by using this link. If you want to post a screen shot of your results maybe we'll see something that sticks out.
That is probably it! I recently added a couple Imou battery cameras. They use their own wifi , probably near the zwave and zigbee channels.. I will try moving them around
That would do it! As a test try shutting them all down... including the base station. It's likely the base station that's the issue. There's also lots of free wifi scanners you can use.
They have their own base transmitter that connects to the cameras, to make matters worse I have two of the bases. Amcrest sold me one, then stopped making them so I have twice the interference now
I have Arlo cameras and three Arlo base units. All wifi. I am ripping them all out come spring and going with hardwired PoE cameras. I hate the Arlos but they were quick and easy at the time, especially in a 150 year old house.
The way around this is to strengthen your zigbee mesh. Give end-devices multiple routes back to the hub/coordinator.
I live in an area where the 2.4 GHz spectrum is very busy, and have found that having a repeater to end-device ratio of around 1:4 keeps my zigbee devices stable and connected to the hub. I also recommend using higher quality zigbee repeaters - I find the TuYa USB repeaters to be particularly good indoors. As a bonus, they are inconspicuous.
This is how busy it is .... so it doesn't matter what zigbee channel I pick, there's interference. Yet, having lots of high quality repeaters keeps both my zigbee meshes (zigbee channels 20 and 25) very stable.
I had this issue earlier as there was a conflict between Zigbee and Wi-Fi Band.
Now I changed my Wi-Fi channel to 11(This channel selection feature depends on the access point/ Router firmware) and Hubitat Zigbee channel to 15. There is no interference between these two.
Now my Zigbee mesh is very reliable and sensors have no dropout
