Hi all, I recently moved from Fibaro HC2 to Homey Pro (2023), partially because the Ikea Zigbee devices are very affordable
I do have a problem now: I fail to extend my Zigbee network to our garden house & office (circa 10-15m away). Weirdly, I need to reduce the gaps between Zigbee devices in the garden house to max 3m to get a proper connection. Your expert view would be highly appreciated.
Full details:
I have 4 Zigbee devices (3x Ikea lamps and dimmers, 1x Nous wall plug) in the house that all work perfectly fine (they respond fast and adequate)
In the garden house / office, I have 6 devices (3x Ikea dimmers, an Ikea remote, the Homey bridge in Satellite mode and 1 Nous wall plug)
The Nous wall plug in the house is the one nearest to the back of the house and the Nous wall plug is the one in the garden house / office that is nearest to the house (and the other Nous plug). This duo operates as expected.
From there on, the only way I have got this to work is to leave max 3 meter between devices… Without it, devices cannot be pinged nor operated beyond the Nous wall plug in the garden house / office.
I have looked into Wifi interference (see below)
In addition, I run a Z-wave network of 40+ devices (that properly extends all the way to the garden house)
Re WIFI
I have several Unifi access points around the house, amongst which one in the office
Zigbee operates on Channel 20
I have a 2.4 GHz wifi network running on Channel 11. Turning on/off the AP in the office does not make a difference. Below a screenshot of other wifi signals.
I’m not an expert on this, but the range of 3m seems really low to me. Especially when the Homey pro itself is still in range of the device. I think each node (probably also depending on their power source being battery or plugin?) should be waaaaay more. Google it and it talks about up to 75m realistically? Take it with a grain of salt and please if an expert reads this tell it how it really is : '-)
Long story short, what I do know is that there are cheap range extenders (also from Ikea), so as long if there is a power scoket on your route to the backyard that could help maybe?
Also, 3m is perhaps a bit on the low side, but especially in areas with lots of WiFi networks you shouldn’t expect Zigbee to have a range of more than about 3 to 5m.
Not sure where you are based or what the construction standards are there. I live in Sweden in a house built in the 60’s. Turns out that all of our outside walls are lined with some sort of metal foil - I guess it was how they did waterproofing at the time. Effectively turns our house into a giant faraday cage. Great because it blocks the neighbor’s wifi signals, but horrible because we can’t even get reception in our porch area or our entryway area (which was an extension built in the 90s).
One option you might look at is putting a MQTT router in the guest house and then connecting the devices to that, and then connecting that to Homey via wifi…
