Best location for Homey Bridge

Questions & Help
1

I order the Homey Bridge and I wonder what the best place is to put it in my home.

Some context:

I am running Homey Self hosted for a couple of months now.

On that same server I have home assistant running but I plan to switch completely to Homey.

I have Zigbee devices on various floors in my house: ground floor, first and second.

I want to make sure that all devices that are not on the network can be controlled via the bridge.

I personally think putting it on the first floor would be the best option but I am wondering if e.g the range is sufficient to put it somewhere on the ground floor.

2

Yes, the first floor would be the best option. As long as you have enough routers (depending on the size of your house), it should work fine.

3

Thanks for your response. I have perfect WiFi coverage over the house. I have one router on the first floor and a second one on the first floor (mesh network)

4

I mean ZigBee routers (all mains powered ZigBee devices are ZigBee routers), I didn’t mean WiFi routers.

5

Ah sorry. I didn’t know that. I have 5 on the ground floor, 3 on the first floor and currently only one on the second.

6

That should be enough for a stable ZigBee network, it does depend on the size of your house though. But in most cases, that is enough ZigBee routers for a stable network.

1 Like
7

Hi Alex,

I wondered which zigbee controller you are using at the moment? And where did you mount the antenna?

8

Currently I’m using the Sonoff USB 3.0 dongle

9

I see. I use the Sonoff ZBdongle-E and it’s “invisibly” doing it’s job very well.

When you use Home Assistant with zigbee2mqtt, you can link Homey to the zigbee devices per zigbee2mqtt community app, or Home Assistant community app.
Or you can run zigbee2mqtt as standalone docker container.

In my humble opinion replacing it with Homey Bridge is a downgrade concerning zigbee.
But with only 8 zigbee devices the bridge should do the job.

Homey also supports not as many devices as zigbee2mqtt does;
It’s important to search the homey.app store if all of your zigbee devices are supported.
Im theory (simple) zigbee lights, switches and plugs should work without an app.

2 Likes
10

Agreed.

11

Thanks for the feedback. The main reason why I decided to buy the bridge is because I hope that my ecodim dimmers will start working better as they currently do. All of the devices are controlled via HomeKit and e.g. when I turn a light on it will actually turn on at 50% brightness - so it remains off when brightness < 50%. My hope is that the Homey app has better support for these products.

12

YW.

About the dimmers: it really sounds like you didn’t calibrate those (=set the lower and upper boundaries);
it should be performed on the dimmer itself.

(It needs to be performed again, in case you connect (an) other light(s) which use more/less Watts.)

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.
An other issue what can occur, but probably not applicable in your case:
when a lamp won’t dim to 0%, you’d have to add a resistor, called “bypass”; because many LED lights draw too little power for a dimmer to work properly.

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It’s very unlikely an other zigbee controller or Homey app will solve it.

13

Thank you all for your input. I’ve been running the bridge for about a week now and I have to say that so far my experience was smooth. Currently my bridge is located in the living room.I still have to connect my dimmers but my other Zigbee devices are connected (IKEA lights in the wardrobe, Frient smoke alarms and Sonoff switches).