From my test they are the real deal.
My house is 3 story 2500 sq ft.
My hubitat hub is sitting in one corner of my basement where I keep all my hubs and equipment. I have 3 ikea outlets on the main floor and one upstairs and also have my xbee upstairs in my office.
I have about 7 leak sensors 5 vibration sensors, 7 motion sensors, 10 temp sensors and a wack of contact sensors on every door/window. I also have a contact sensor inside my metal mailbox outside, a sensor on the side door of the garage and two vibration sensors on the garage doors at the front of the house (I'm actually shocked these stay connected as they are the furthest away from anything but they get used every day and still check in). My only other zigbee devices are 5 sengled bulbs in the basement. They are not routers.
Looking at the mesh, most of the devices connect directly to the hub or to the xbee. A few connect to the routers. I thought more would go through the routers but not as many as I though. They also jump around. I have devices in the basement sitting near the hub going through a router on the main floor. Its strange. I could pair one right next to the router and its still going directly to the hub. You can't assume they are using the router. But they do bounce around.
My wifi is on Channel 1 (its a eero mesh setup) and my hubitat hub zigbee channel is 23. I saw one of the biggest changes in reliability when I got the channels right. Higher channels though caused problems with zigbee devices. I started at 26 and moved down and it wasn't until 23 that it stabilized. I am also in a detached house. When I look at wifi networks in the area I see some but nothing over powering. I only have 1 neighbor and their wifi is very basic. So my wifi interference is very minimal if anything. I could see this being more of an issue in an apartment when your surrounded by wifi routers.
I have a script running (similar to the other device monitor scripts you find on the forum) that check the last activity of every xiaomi device. With my previous sylvania plugs I had it set to notify me if they didn't check in after 3 hours. Even though they missed check ins for that long they were still working though. Their checkin is just not making it to the hub. Now that I have all ikea outlets I set the script to notify me if they don't check in after two hours. I noticed that 99% of the devices would check in every hour but there would be that one that would check in at an hour and 20 minutes. It was still working though and been using 2 hours all week and I've gotten no notifications with missed checkins for these devices.
I've had the same issues on both the ST hub and the Hubitat hub. I never got it working as reliable on the ST hub but I also didn't stick around on ST long enough to work on it.
I've spent many hours working on this to get them working. Looking at mesh's, testing routers digging through driver code and writing my own apps to monitor. Its was a big investment but it has paid off and is now stable and working great.
I may be an exception here. I don't know if anybody monitors it like I do or has as many but I keep a really close eye on it all because if they get stuck it affects other automation's such as my heating, garage doors, security system etc.
I'm starting to wonder if some of the problems too are hardware related. They seem really extreme in some cases. You just never know.
(Another long ■■■ post)
