I just joined the Homey Community, which is a great tool. However, Homey Pro doesn’t seem to work for us.
Our current setup
Homey Pro
15x INNR gu10
1x IKEA Pilskot
2x Sonos
4 Philips Hue indoor motion detector
If everything is just added everything works. The flows combines the motions detector and the lights.
However, after a while (like 3-4 hours) most debices are not reachable. Homey asks if the device is powered on? The devices are powered on at that moment.
I checked if the channels of WiFi are interfering. They are on 1 and 11 and doesn’t seem to interfere. However we do have solar panels and they have WiFi as well and it’s not clear on which channel they are
I also reset lamps and the homey however that only works for a couple of hours.
If all devices are WiFi devices, it’s most likely a WIFI issue. There are more topics about these kinds of issues, and most of the time it isn’t Homey that’s really causing the issue I think. Can you explain a bit more about the WIFI network (what kind of WIFI router/Accesspoints),and if the signal strength is good in all these locations where the devices are etc?
Also you can try and see if all devices are reachable by doing a PING on the IP address of the devices from for example a laptop/PC/phone, that is connected to the same network.
If the devices are zigbee, then there is no relation to your wifi network, and indeed you will be unable to ping them. I don’t see why the solar panels would be an issue with that. Are these devices connected directly to your Homey, or through a bridge?
Oh sorry, I thought it would be something wit interference of the zigbee and WiFi signal. That’s why.
So no they are not coonected to the homey in any way. It’s o my connected to zigbee.
Sometimes I can ping them actually.
Then INNR lamps are connected to the homey directly, with an app
Philips hue motion sensor, using the Philips hue without a bridge
IKEA lamps are connected to the homey without a bridge, with an app
It’s a two level story building. All of the lamps are within a 5 meter range. I replaced the homey because it was standing next to the router. But it’s approximately the same distance
You only need to check and possibly tune both wifi and zigbee channels.
Please follow the zigbee Troubleshooting link I just shared.
But (temporary) turning off 2.4GHz should make a difference if it interferes.
Don’t forget the possible 2.4GHz wifi signals of your possible neighbours.
There’s several wifi check phone apps, to make the signals visible, f.i. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=abdelrahman.wifianalyzerpro
One a few lamps there is indeed a not smart switch.
However on most of the lamps not. That’s the biggest problem, because they do not react so there is no light most of the times or they do not switch off …
Yeah we try but as homey isn’t capable of switching it reliable, we need to power it off otherwise it will be on the whole night
Is this something normal that it isn’t reliable at all?
As it is a professional environment we’re considering switching it all back to normal. Asking employees to pee in the dark because homey isn’t responding isn’t something that we want. If I look at the forum it seems it’s more of hobby product.
I consider Homey a nice at home toy.
Is it marketed as professional controller for offices and such?
It’s not a 24/7 100% up reliable device. But what is?
In that case you’d work with a failover unit, UPS battery backup (& even generators)
And keep in mind no wireless radio signal is reliable, none.
I have a network consisting of Z-wave and Zigbee. By its nature, Z-wave is on a lower frequency and therefore has less trouble in communication through walls. And z-wave is a reliable protocol, downside being devices are fairly expensive.
Zigbee works in the 2.4 Ghz range, same as Wifi, and higher frequencies have more trouble with communicating through walls, and may have trouble from interference with all other devices using the free 2,4 Ghz frequency, from yourself or your neighbours.
The networks are mesh-networks, in both cases, so each non-battery powered device will act as a repeater to forward the communication to the next device that is within range, until the target is reached. So having many devices in both Z-wave and Zigbee will make a more reliable network, you can even buy specific Zigbee/Zwave repeaters, I did that and indeed it made it more reliable. I live in a large house with many floors and walls, and especially with Zigbee I had a lot of communication problems.
The measure that really solved this is hardware and software based:
1 Hardware: the internal homey zigbee hardware s*cks in my opinion, so I added a rasbberry pi with a zigbee usb stick that communicates to the homey with Zigbee2Mqtt. Homey has a Z2M app in the store, so in the Homey automation the devices are still visible, as if they were using the Homey native zigbee network. Works like a charm. The Homey z-wave native hardware is reasonably good in my opinion, would also like to have a separate solution for that but that is still in my investigation, and also the need is not that high since zwave communication is reliable enough.
2 Software : creating automation flows in homey is very simple, create an action and put a switch or whatever on or off, directly from the flow. In my case there were more than acceptable timeout errors, both on zigbee and less on zwave. But instead of directly commanding a device to go on/off from a flow, I created a Homey script that looks for the device, tries to turn it on/off 5 times, and if it does not succeed there is a serious problem and gives an error message in the timeline. So not relying on first-time right device invocations from the flow, I decided to add more retries, and that worked. From a flow a use the command to invoke a homey script, giving the parameters the name of the device and the desired action.
In the end, domotics on this level is a hobby, I would not use it to control a nuclear power plant, so be prepared for exciting new possibilities, but also a learning curve in solving problems, when your domotics network grows, it is certainly not out-of-the box.
!
