Homey Pro (2019) brought to its knees?!

Just because there are people where Homey (Pro) does not seem to work for, doesn’t mean that it does not work for anyone. Some of the people mentioning this did not even try the pro version.
It all just depends on what you are doing with it, which devices/apps etc.
For me, it had been working rock solid for over a long time now.
And that’s lucky for me, as I would not have the time and mood to setup something else on own hardware with crappy interfaces and steap learning curves or lots of manual programming/tweaking.

Hi,

Depends on the platform you use. In homey there is no need for that. But if you want to write apps, then yes. In home assistant, also not but is a bit more difficult gui. But if you want to get the most out of it you make use of yaml configuration files. Also not very difficult but A bit more complicated. But there are lots of youtube videos about it. But if you using this then it is easy to make very powerful automation, scenes, sensors. For example I have made a sensor that gets the number of new corona cases in the Netherlands. Just 3 lines :grinning:. Which in home I need to build probably an app for or write something with homey script.

Hi,
I don’t experience any of the issues you mention with my homey pro but my setup is a bit different.

  • I still have 2 Hue bridges to be sure that my family is always able to do basic things like controlling the lights. (As every light and every switch in my home is Hue or Friends of Hue)
  • I made sure my WiFi network is stable in every corner of my home.
  • I stick with only a few brands for important automations instead of mixing really everything (Aquara, Fibaro, qubino)
  • I have enough zigbee routers to assure a stable zigbee mesh.

I did have some issues with IKEA stuff, so I just don’t use them anymore…

So maybe I am just lucky, but this setup works very stable for me.

By the way, I have 100+ flows running…

Hello all,

I have now shut down my Homey Pro. It was not a decision that was made easily. I like it, I like the UI, I like the many connection types it has etc. But there are 3 things I just can’t work with:

  • The very low limit in number of Zigbee units it can handle
  • The limited Apple Homekit integration (will get to that later in this post)
  • The complexity in simple things like button with dim actions

My setup is now as follows:

I now have a Conbee II USB stick in my Synology NAS running docker with Phoscon. An easy and 1-2-3 like setup. This little €39 USB stick handles almost all my Zigbee devices without a sweat. I run way over 100 IKEA, Aqara, Hue, Nordtronic Zigbee dimmers and Xiaomi units on the Conbee II. The only units I didn’t have any luck pairing was my IKEA blinds and IKEA Shortcut buttons. I still have my IKEA gateway handling those units. However, the second I have a stable firmware that can handle them they will be moved to Conbee.

The software to control Conbee II is called Phoscon. And this (very) simple tool handles my switches, sensors and bulbs perfectly - and most important recognizes the buttons on the switches - with simple click and point graphical configuration. This means that my IKEA and Hue switches now works with all the different buttons, like dim, colors, and toggle. Very easy… And you can have bulbs in multiple groups so they can be handles by multiple sensors or switches.

My end goal has always been having all devices in Homekit. I am one of the 2% that actually likes Siri, and our entire household runs Apple products. This was also the goal with Homey - but after having tried both the build-in Homekit beta integration and the Homekit app, it was just not enough. I didn’t get the buttons on the switches or the sensor details transferred - and it was sluggish.

So, I went for Homebridge on another Docker container on my Synology NAS. Easy integration between Phoscon and Homebridge, and Homebridge and Homekit. I can now control all buttons on the switches from Homekit and sensors are showing with all information like temperatures, humidity, movement and so on are transferred.

Some of the downsides with this setup are:

  • The complexity: Even if it is a relatively simple setup it is still nerdy
  • Backup: I must maintain backup on each individual server
  • Workload: Homebridge has messed up my connection to Homekit one or twice due to updates
  • Open Source

I will still follow the hopefully many improvements - but if the comments are correct Homey will never be able to handle the sheer amount of my smart home devices due to hardware limitations. On paper it was the perfect smart home solution, but in my case it was just not enough. I am sure many many people out there will continue to have many good experiences and I am sure Homey will continue evolving.

/k

I would like to know your overall CPU\ Memory usage rather than just the Apps.

Anyway, I have “only” 45 Zigbee routers\end devices directly connected to Homey and am not experiencing any of these problems.
I also have 60+ Philips Hue light bulbs that are directly connected to my Hue bridge and communicate with Homey through it’s APIs. This works perfectly fine and when one of my Aqara motion sensors are triggered Homey asks Hue to turn on a certain light which is almost instant (v5.0 Homey). I would not even see a real need for having my Hue devices all connected to Homey as I sometimes prefer using the hue app to changes lights\scenes\colors over Homekit. All my (non-zigbee) devices such as IR, Zwave, RF and WiFi, I can present to Homekit through Homey which makes it, for me at least, a very complete Homekit enabler (and home automation solution in general). What I am trying to say is that Homey is more than just a Zigbee receiver; it ties many different protocols together in a way that, for example, Conbee could never do as it is limited to one protocol. That is what stands Homey apart from the rest in my opinion and worth the (hefty) price tag. It is all a matter of expectations and there I would agree that many products (not only Homey) do a great job in selling but a poor job in clearly mentioning limitations.

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@KristianWind is basically doing what you’re already doing yourself: using a better Zigbee controller. He may or may not consider using the deCONZ app for Homey, like you’re using the Hue app.

I know firsthand that Homey’s Homekit implementations are limited, partly due to the mismatch that exists between how Homey and Homekit work internally and partly due to the app developers having moved to other systems.

Homey does look very attractive on paper, with all major home automation protocols supported, but in practice they don’t always work very well, with users having to buy alternative hubs to get things like IR, RF or Zigbee working properly in their situation.

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I guess the real difference is that I rely on multiple protocols to work together rather that just one. A small but crucial difference since there are multiple solutions that are better at just a single protocol but none have the charm, user friendly approach and protocol harmony that Homey has. You might favor an all-in one solution over the other but that is not necessarily because it’s better, it just has different limitations that you might not run into.
Like I said in my previous response, it all comes down to your expectations and needs whether or not Homey is worth the price for you.

I also have the same problems with my Homey Pro 2019. Have about 100 devices, but approx 80 of them is Z-Wave, the rest Zigbee and some wifi. The best user experience to describe is unstable, slow and impossible to debug.

  • Lights turn on 5 seconds after entering a room (if they turn on at all). My old non smart motion detectors are way faster and more reliable.
  • Thermostats sometimes turn on and sometimes not
  • Things suddenly stops working.
  • Google Nest Hub responding with trouble accessing Homey on every second voice command. But sometimes it works even thoug it says it cant connet.
  • Thermostats both physical and virtual turns themself on and off without my control. And its not possible to debug if it is the unit itself, a user in Homey, a Homey flow, Google integration, Tibber integration or some other app. Its not possible to see who/what triggers a change to a device and thats pretty frustrating.
  • Almost impossible to pair new devices now. Takes like 40 tries over a period of two weeks to get new Z-Wave devices added.

I hoped having a smarthouse should not be a hobby for the technically interested - but it surely is. I even consider soldiering better Zigbee and Z-wave antennas to Homey (have them laying on my desk) but would rather by upgraded HW from Homey with external replaceable antennas, Ethernet port and a closure that fits in my rack.

So I’m a bit dissapointed by this. But will keep Homey as I don’t get the impression that the competition is any better. The whole smarthouse universe is immature.

Just my 2 cents.

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@Thomas_Ekdahl Pretty much all your symptoms point towards a z-wave device (or even multiple) that is over sending data, it isn’t hard to debug, you just should know where to look which is the developer tools → z-wave and look in the table with the column RX (which is receive) if 1 device has a (very) high RX then that is your problem giver, if it is hard to distinguish which one then most likely your Homey has been on for a while, so restart your Homey so the counters are reset

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After having multiple Zigbee problems with both a regular Homey and a Homey Pro I moved all my Zigbee devices (and most other devices now) to Home Assistent where the same Zigbee issues do not occur.

On Homey the Zigbee network just stops working at least once a week. Yes, I use routers and I have restarted with a fresh Homey and added several Zigbee routers first before adding endpoint devices.

Since heating the house depends on the Aqara temperature sensors and my happy life depends on a warm house this was an unworkable situation.

When everything was still on Homey flows often were very slow, sometimes taking over ten seconds to turn on a light.

I admit I have numerous brands in both my Zigbee and Zwave network but not more than the advertised limit of the Homey Pro.

My current goal is to move all devices to HA, then create some virtual devices on the Homey and link them with MQTT. That way the wife can keep using the Homey app and we can still issue commands using Google Home.

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Go for Hubitat Elevation Hub

Costs 1/3 of Homey Pro, has amazing quadcore CPU, ZWAVE 700 chip and a veery fast system.

Thanks for the tip. I had a look at the z-wave network with these new pair of eyes, and it became quite obvoius that it all my Aeotec MultiSensor 6 have a very much higher RX rate than everything else. I have 13 of these sensors - all with more traffic than all other devices with one exception. The Qubino Smart meter which is worst of all. The sensors are powered so they also act as repeaters as I understand - so maybe this is correct?

With this knowledge - how can I fix the problem? Seems like it is dependent on the update interval of the sensor, since I have tried increasing this earlier on some snsors. The sensors with increased update interval has less RX traffic. I have now set all sensor to 90 second update interval (I think default is 30) - and will see if that helps.

It can have multiple things that are wrong, totally depending on the device/brand, the most common ones are:

  • battery getting low (yes, some sensor can start sending lots of data when their battery gets low), so replace the battery.
  • the firmware can get messed up by some power spike from the socket out (nothing much you can do about this), or like a washing machine turning on (had this personally with a fibaro wall plug), a factory reset might help, i needed to replace mine with a different socket that could handle bigger loads;
  • the device just being bad in it self (like myself have had a few from a bad batch of NodOn micro plugs), replacing is the only option
  • a bad setting put in by the user (reset the setting(s), if you can, it might not get through with all data being send, so a factory reset is mandatory)

but there are many more.

… “in fixing mesh networks” … I am very very interested in that!
Any starting tips? ( I have Kaku and slowly changing to zigbee/z-wave but encounter simple stumbling blocks already (eg. some devices only become avaliable after powercycling their parent mesh node after Homey reboot… finally found that after running with the experimental channel leading to 5.0)

I am triggerd by your wording and start googling that, would love a great starting point from you

Start with adding “router” devices (non-battery powered devices) and make sure u have enough of them.
That devices will build a mesh. Battery powered devices will not build a mesh, they only connect thru the mesh.

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makes a lot of sense!
checking my current “router” devices, and where I must add more then :wink:

I thank you sir!

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Well, I recognise the issue you write with the Homey pro. I’m really happy with it but it is not powerful enough for me. I’ve got 34 apps running and 206 devices. The cpu load is normally between 110 and 180%. Whatever I do, I cannot get it lower without removing flows I like or devices I use.

Thanks for sharing your solution. I will also take a look at that. Hopefully there will come an 4 core homey with faster processing power.

That will be a Super Homey!

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Yes, Super Homey! Powerrrrrr :muscle:

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Also good for load average!

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