After several issues with the Zigbee range I added a few Aeotec Zigbee range extenders to my house. Since then I never had an issue like this anymore. I even have a power plug that is 15-20 meters away from the range extenders and working fine.
I can confirm that many mains powered devices do not properly act as a router.
Hi everybody,
First of all, thanks for you advices 
I’ve bought only one Sonoff Zigbee plug and now, it works grest, despite the Sonoff temperature sensor is really far from the Homey, maybe 25 meters 
So, no need to buy something else 
Hey! Just put one of these in between and it will work perfect:
I use them as well for my SONOFF water valves at the end of my garden. Has never failed!
I had difficulty with getting the Sonoff thermometer to connect from my pool and I echo the experience of those reporting the inadequacy of power plugs to stabilize the network. I think everyone’s setup and infrastructure is different and you have to evaluate the different paths to a solution. I gave up on the wireless zigbee route and went with a hard wired DS18B20 thermometer probe for my pool vis a ESP 32 board. That’s what worked for me in my situation. Evaluate as many approaches as you can to determine what’s likely to work for you and don’t get lock in if it’s not happening.
If You can find IKEA’s INSPELNING plug sare these really cost effective way to extend Your Zigbee range. I added few around the the house and the the Zigbee is really solid.
Note that the new GRILLPLATS plugs is Matter and not Zigbee!
Do you have wifi nearby? I think that this is the exact use case for adding a homey bridge to your network. I also have one homey bridge in my attic which is two floors above my apartment. It works flawlessly.
Here you can see my zigbee map. The Homey bridge extends the zigbee network, but communicates with homey pro over wifi. Therefore it has no TX, TX Error and RX. All devices that are in the attic are connected to the homey bridge.
The homey Bridge can also extend all other networks like z-wave, bluetooth, and 433mhz.
Homey Bridge does not extend your Zigbee network over WiFi, it’s just a regular Zigbee router (and an expensive one at that).
Oh, is that true? Well it does a very good job then! I had the homey bridge laying around and decided to add it to my network because I also had range issues. Never had any problems since then. The fact that there is truly no TX Error between Homey Pro and the Homey bridge also proofs that.
I also have some z-wave devices that needed to be extended, and since I had the homey bridge laying around, adding it was a no-brainer. But if you only need to extend zigbee, then a simple zigbee extender might also work. But as soon as you also need to extend z-wave, the Homey bridge offers the most economical and seamless solution.
One additional question to this theory? How come this works with SHS then?
Maybe they recently changed something in the Homey bridge to make this work and now the Homey bridge does relay zigbee over lan?
In that case the Bridge works just like it does for Homey Cloud, as a Zigbee (and other protocols) hub. If you use it as a satellite for Homey Pro, it’ll just be a Zigbee router.
You can easily find out by opening this page to see if the Bridge shows up there. If so, it’s just a regular Zigbee router.
Well you can put the grillplats in zigbee mode. But you will no be able to use the metering function, but it will act as a zigbee repeater.
Yes, true.
I haven’t tested the Zigbee router functionality on these though when these are running in Zigbee mode…
I have. And I had no problem using then as a repeater in zigbee mode, but it will turn in to a On/off only device
I’m not sure that is the case anymore. Why would it operate differently? Whether you add it to Homey Pro or Homey SHS, you add it to your Homey by adding it as a device. The bridge would then have to relay the signal from the zigbee device to the Homey server. If you add it to Homey SHS, the device itself has no zigbee antenna, so the Homey bridge will have to relay over LAN. Why would it work differently for a Homey Pro?
As you can see in my screenshot, I did looked up the devices in my zigbee network, and both the Homey Pro and the Homey bridge show no TX, TX errors or TX retries. Why would it show like that? If a Homey Bridge only relays zigbee signals to the Homey Pro over the zigbee network, wouldn’t at least have some TX Retries? I would definitely be able to debug that if I encounter errors.
Also, regarding a Homey bridge with Homey cloud. I think that under the hood, there isn’t even a change in how it works there. The only difference is that Homey cloud runs on a server outside of your premise. There’s a slight difference in UI to make it more intuitive to people only using Homey Cloud and to make it look like you bought something more intelligent than it actually is.
Because Homey Pro already has a Zigbee antenna. The Bridge is just a Zigbee router like any other smart plug or light bulb. BLE, RF and IR get relayed via the network.
In case of Homey Cloud: Homey Bridge becomes the Zigbee coordinator and receives all Zigbee packets from the server and simply relays them.
In case of SHS: Homey Bridge becomes the Zigbee coordinator and receives all Zigbee packets over LAN from the SHS.
In case of Homey Pro (2023 and later): Homey Bridge becomes a Zigbee router and joins the existing network
Homey Pro 2016-2019 don’t support Satellite Mode at all
I’m sure you know more about Zigbee than I do, but a Zigbee network can only have one controller. If you have a Homey Pro, it acts as a controller and it’s simply not possible for the Bridge to also be one in the same Zigbee network. And hence, it’s also not possible for it to relay Zigbee data over WiFi to the Pro.
Ah, clear. So in short, Homey SHS and Homey Cloud work technically the same but with a different UI in the sense that the bridge will be the zigbee controller. And for Homey Pro, it works differently and the bridge just acts a zigbee router.. In the devices overview I indeed see that the Homey Bridge is a zigbee router and not a coordinator. But I thought that Homey was able to do something clever underneath.
Yes, correct. Homey Bridge relays all signals in case of Homey Cloud (probably using a TCP communication channel with the broker.homeybridge.net server) and SHS (using a local TCP channel from the SHS). In case of Pro Mini, it relays some signals using a local TCP channel (Z-Wave, RF, BLE, IR) and it just becomes a regular Zigbee router. In case of Pro 2023 and later, it relays RF, BLE and IR over the network and becomes a regulad Zigbee and Z-Wave router.
If you want a Zigbee coordinator over the network, you need to use a third party gateway like a Hue bridge (supports all Zigbee lights and smart plugs) or Tuya bridge (also supports many third party devices, even non-Tuya) which acts as a Zigbee coordinator and uses the bridge vendor’s API for communicating with Homey
This is what Athom themselves say when using the Bridge in satellite mode (so when connected to a Homey Pro): Set up Satellite Mode for Homey Pro
Bluetooth and RF/433 Mhz are bridged over your LAN; Zigbee and Z-Wave not: the Bridge is added as a router to the existing Zigbee/Z-Wave mesh network.
