Hello fellow Homey’s - and I hope someone from Athom!
I am very new to the Homey universe but I am a long time Smart Home owner. I have approx. 100 units and I am planning til expand the network with lots (!) more. I primarily use IKEA Trådfri (80), Aqara (10) and Hue (10). It was all connected to HomeKit.
Info: I have about 50-60 Flows in Homey but expect this to be at least double - that is if I don’t through in the towel before that…
I have now transferred all devices to Homey from the IKEA, Aqara and Hue bridges - and boy it is slow. I mean SLOW! Bulbs failing to turn on, Homey loosing connections to devices, Homey looses connection to my Wifi, lights that won’t turn off, Blinds that won’t open an so on…
And in the middle of all this there is me looking like a complete and utter fool spending this kind of money on a device that I in theory already had with the individual bridges and Homekit - with a better result.
What is going on? Can this kind of setup really bring a Homey Pro to its knees?
I have made some delays which helps somewhat in some instances - but it really looks idiotic when the six hallway lights turn on with 1 second delay on each. The same goes with kitchen lights etc. And it still isn’t stable.
To be fair: I was also struggling with the IKEA bridge as is is designed to handle 50 devices max. But even with 80+ devices it outperforms Homey by miles!
By the way - an idea to keep the amounts of Flows to a minimum: In the “When” section add an “or” feature. This way I don’t need a Flow to each of the dimmers/buttons in one room…
You’re running into a few long-standing issues with Homey:
flows that operate on multiple devices can exhibit issues with one or more devices not responding to the commands being sent because (my suspicion) Homey randomly drops actions;
Homey’s WiFi and networking can be very unstable
These issues have existed for quite a while now (years), so I assume that they can’t be fixed.
Given the fact that the issues have existed for so long and the new v5 firmware is being rolled out which, AFAIK, hasn’t fixed any of these issues leads me to conclude that they simply can’t be fixed and are of the learning-to-live-with-it type.
This is not the trouble. Had 750+ running on a 2016 model. Was not a record i even heard. Along with 72 apps running (which was almost a record) there was no problems at all with that Homey.
It is nice to hear that it CAN work - but I have “only” added a few apps, added the devices and created simple Flows like turn on or off lights, open or close blinds or automatically turn on the outside lights when the sun goes down. Things like that.
It could be the Apps, but it looks like they do not push the system at all:
What is your idle CPU load? I have issues which sound like yours, with a lot fewer devices. And the CPU load when doing nothing (except receiving and logging sensor data) is 40-80%. I haven’t figured out why yet, but considering that, it is no wonder that large flows overload it.
My personal experience: I had 50+ zigbee devices (Aqara sensors & bulbs and Tuya plugs) on my Homey 2019 with continuous stability issues on FW5, and Athom support eventually concluded that I was probably hitting the limit of the CC2530 zigbee chip because some of these devices were too “chatty” (I suspect the Blitzwolf/Tuya plugs). I bought a Conbee II stick which is supposed to support 100+ devices without problems. Installed deCONZ in docker on my NAS and linked it to Homey using the HomeyCONZ app and immediately noticed how much faster turning on and off the lights was, even with the additional wifi hop. And more importantly: no more stability issues!
Okay, this is way past disappointing. I have now ordered a Conbee II to take the load for the €399 unit that was supposed to do it all. So much for “One Bridge To Rule Them All”.
I think u give up on this very fast. After 40 minutes read time on the forums u conclude that buying a Conbee stick is the best option? “to take the load for the €399 unit that was supposed to do it all” ?
Well i hope it works out for u but if i was u i would have spend some more time in fixing mesh networks, WiFi networks and flow building. But hey, that’s just me.
Good advice! However this is not someting I just agreed to do - and rest assure that I have spend days in the forums before registrating and starting the thread…
Have been looking into this for a while, and since I have a whole house that is not working - and since I am the only one in our household that can turn on or off lights, raise the blinds or run around outside and un- and replug the bulbs I have to do something NOW. The only alternative is to go back to the IKEA, Aqara and Hue gateways while figuring this out - and that’s just at step back, which I do not want to do.
The USB stick costs 1/10 of the Homey, so it was an easy way for me to go…
Well, I may have been just unlucky with my devices. I was aware of potential issues like 20 the device limit and mesh/routing issues, but I did not expect anything like this. I even considered moving away from Homey to HA completely, but I have a few non-zigbee devices connected to Homey, and really like the overall UI/App and user experience. And to me it also provides a good balance between allowing more complex automations (with some frustrating limitations here and there) while still being really easy to work with. It also helps a bit that I got my 2019 Homey second hand for €225.
I had similar issues, also lot of devices on a 2016 model. Disconnects of wifi, when I switch on 5 lamps sometimes they went all on but often 1 or 2 failed. So I had to decide move to a pro version or search for something else. Very hard decision as I really liked homey but I moved to Home Assistant. The pro version of homey had still not the hardware specs what I expected from a pro version and I was still afraid that I end up with the same trouble. Now after 3/4 of year using home assistant I am glad that I made the switch. It is fast, stable and development of things goes a lot quicker and I can choose my own hardware. The downside is that it has a steeper learning curve. But if you understand it. It is way more flexible then Homey. I have still my Homey as I have warm feelings for it. But I think athom needs to make for 399 a real pro version and should better read the forums on what people want. They made a few big development mistakes in my opinion. So I am not saying you need to switch but if you have a lot of devices, automation and apps. I don’t think homey is the right platform for now. Just my 2 cents
Then you took the right decision not to get the Pro for sure. I explicitly asked Homey support if getting the Pro might solve my zigbee issues and they admitted it would NOT, simply because it uses the exact same limited/cheap CC2530 zigbee chip. And I agree that the Pro (or a future product) should use a more capable zigbee chip.
Note that I do not have extreme amounts of flows, and CPU/RAM utilization on Homey was fine. In my case this was strictly zigbee related, hence the offload of zigbee handling to deCONZ which integrates with Homey through the api. I assume others leave this to the Hue bridge, which would obviously also work.
