I have a very large Homey set up with 80+ units and a lot of advanced flows, some of them quit complex. Therefore I decided to upgrade to the 2026 edition of Homey Pro. I also have a guest house about 20 metres away from the main building where the Homey Pro is situated. I have not really had any issues with the units there, but 100% reliability is very important, so I decided to also buy a Homey brigde.
First I made a backup and then installed the new Homey pro, upgraded firmware and downloaded the backup. Alll that went fine. I discovered that some units did not work, but they gradually started to work except a few. The units in the guesthouse did not connect. So I installed the Homey Bridge (as a unit) and placed it in the guest house. Some units have started to work, some units has been reconnected by using “Repair” in the unit properties, but some units refuse to connect, both through “Repair” or reset/connect as a new unit. The units which will not connect are Namrom Zigbee switch and Namron Zigbee dimmer - like most of my other units). Also some but not all units respond slowly. I suspect the problem might be that the units are not using the new Homey Bridge, but I really don´t know how to detect what is the problem and how to fix it. In the Homey app the bridge says “working correclt and letting you connect more units”. When I bougt it, I specifically asked if it also works with Homey Pro 2026 and they said yes. Anyone?
Note that the Homey Bridge does NOT extend ZigBee or ZWave via WiFi or LAN, it’s just a regular ZigBee/ZWave router just like any other mains powered ZigBee or ZWave device.
It was initially intended for Homey Cloud users as a cheap antenna/entry level Homey. To make Homey Pro more attractive to people who already own the Homey Bridge (from Homey Cloud), they let you re-use the Bridge as a repeater for your Homey Pro.
There’s not really a reason to specifically buy it for extending the range, it only makes sense if you want to extend BLE, IR and RF/433mhz range (that gets extended over WiFi)
I can also add that some units also in the main building and close to the Homey Pro 2026 server are responding extremely slowly - like MANY seconds - and they used to be responding instantly. How come?
Interference maybe? I also had a similar issue with my Hue bridge lately and turned out that my ThirdReality bridge was using the same zigbee channel. Do you have any other ZigBee bridges?
Are you certain you can change the zigbee channel over there? I’ve only read thusfar that it’s quite complex changing the Homey zigbee channel and it would include re-adding all devices when changing the channel over there.
The easiest way would indeed be to change the wifi 2.4ghz band and use the picture you’ve posted to prevent overlapping channels.
No, it can be a bit time consuming when you change the zigbee channel. It can involve re-pair a number of zigbee devices, sometimes multiple times.
Changing the 2.4GHz wifi channel is very simple and doesn’t affect connected wifi gear.
Just pick the channel and you’re done.
(When you never set it, it’s probably on auto channel, which can interfere with zigbee completely at random.)
Indeed. Your only option is to reset the Zigbee network. Homey will then also redetermine the Zigbee channel. Which can be a different one or the same. You may need to perform the said reset several times in order to end up with the desired channel (if you want a specific one).
After the reset you need to repair (not re-pair) all Zigbee devices in Homey via the device’s maintenance option.
