Zigbee Pairing - Best Practices

I'm posting this as a question and hopefully an easy topic for others to search for in the future.

I'm just starting to get some more zigbee devices and just paired my 2nd Aquara temp/press/humidity sensor. I seem to recall some post in the past that suggested the devices must be paired in place if the device was to benefit from a local repeater. Also if paired directly to the hub it will never even look for a local repeater even if the signal to the hub is poor.
Is there a source for best zigbee pairing practices and maintenance (if even possible)?

My thoughts were:

  1. Pairing Recommendations
  2. Channel Recommendations
  3. Maintenance Recommendations. This might be empty as I've not seen a zigbee repair option as the Z-Wave has.

Look at this document: https://docs.hubitat.com/index.php?title=How_to_Build_a_Solid_Zigbee_Mesh

Yes, Zigbee devices must be paired in place. If you cannot pair in place, then your mesh lacks sufficient powered repeaters, and that device will not work where you have it.

A Zigbee mesh network will generally self-heal if you shutdown the hub for 20 minutes, and then start it up again. This self healing process can take 24 hours.

One thing I learned, if you have a SmartThings hub turned on, turn it off before trying to pair zigbee devices. Maybe because the zigbee devices were once paired with SmartThings but even after doing factory resets on all the devices SmartThing still caused pairing problems with Hubitat.

Thank you. I keep on forgetting to search the documentation :frowning: However others searching the forum for this topic will come across this post and know to look at the docs.

John