Troubleshooting Homey and zigbee?

Questions & Help
1

I have been if not happy but content Homey user up till week ago Sunday. My setup includes roughly 50 zigbee and 40 z-wave devices. With Z-wave devices have never had any issues but Zigbee-side has been a bit annoyance. For Zigbee, there are 33 routers, out of which 10 are smart plugs. Pain point has been connection from the house to separate warehouse/garage. With careful positioning of (Osram) plugs have been able to conquer the 8 meter distance between buildings. Bought some Tradfri routers to support the mesh better, and it looked very good. Had actually a week without any devices dropping of the mesh (as far as can self detect - flows working as expected) .

Then came thunderstorm… Electricity went off couple of times for short period with closest strike 3 kilometers away. After storm. Homey was up and responding but Zigbee mesh was mess. What i could notice was that nearly all plugs were not responding, even ones in 2 meter distance from Homey. Did PTP, waiting 15 minutes to cool down. That did not help with plugs. Re-paired all of them ( side comment: re-pairing is just pain in the ass because flows need repair too) and to my surprise everyone seemed to work. Then did a fast reboot and verified all devices and flows worked. Problem solved, i thought. Until the same situation happened next day, and day after. Now i’m in a situation where for example in one room, 2 meters away from Homey, surrounded by 3 plugs, flow lights up Philips bulb often with 5 second delay, sometimes right away and sometimes not at all. Same happens everywhere, it’s as if signal is very slow.

I’m trying to understand what tools there are for troubleshooting the problem. Now it feels as if its just trial-and-error and even then cannot be sure if a particular chance does really fix things. Some notes:

  1. https://developer.athom.com/tools/zigbee does not show Zigbee routes. I am pretty sure i have seen it displaying route similar way as Z-wave- page does, but now it looks like in attached picture. When entering the page, can see with Chrome dev tools that something is going wrong which maybe explains:

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  1. I don’t see anywhere any place where could look for the logs. Am i just blind or are we all?
  2. The performance page does not show anything which is alarming. Apps are behaving. From the system page can see that user processes take roughly 4%, system 5%, rest idling.
  3. I cannot find a place where to send support request to Athom. Tried support.athom.com but no link or button to start a request. If somebody knows where that can be done, please tell.

If the storm broke devices including the hub, then obviously would need to replace them. Now i don’t really know which (if any) of them are broken and which are just having standard Zigbee hiccups.

Anyone having troubleshooting tips, feel free to tell…

2
  1. The Zigbee page may take some time before it’s showing routes, so open it, leave it open, make some coffee, and check again.
  2. Homey is a black box, there are no logs
  3. Performance issues are typically not the cause for Zigbee problems
  4. https://support.athom.com/hc/en-us/articles/360015784034-Submit-a-support-request
2 Likes
3

Same here! I have been wasting time trying to get my Zigbee mesh to work for now a couple of months. 50% of the time things responded and 50% did not. Restarting Homey then things started working again until a few days ago where NOTHING of Zigbee works. I wanted to reset the Zigbee haveing to waste hours in adding again all my 30 devices one by one, but I cannot even reset the Zigbee because that also gives an error: “Error: Zigbee reset could not be completed, please try again. Try restarting Homey” I tried already multiple time to reset everything with no success. I sent a help request to Athom and waiting for an answer which I hope to get fast because nothing works in my house anymore and it is a real pain. I want to avoid a complete factory reset because I have many 433 Mhz behind switches which would require to disassemble the all house which I will not do. If this problem will not be solved, I will say good-buy to Homey for good and use it as a fancy ball because like this is more than a pain rather than help. It is a pitty because the idea is great, but reliability is a GREAT problem and cannot waste all my free time in solving things which do not work or resetting Homey continuously, and that does not work either now. If you have an alternative way to completely reset ZigBee which works, please let me know, it would be greatly appreciated!

4

Well, for me everything changed during Autumn 2020 for couple of reasons. Problematic connection problems to garage were largely solved by switching to z-wave devices and dumping Osram stuff alltogether. At that point were having occasional hickups, maybe one every other day - annoying but manageable. Then took the 5.0 rc version in use. Basically it fixed everything. Since then, I dont recall when i last had to tinker with failing devices or flows.

Hope you get the help from Athom.

6

I can only advise everyone to use a Conbee 2 Zigbee stick in addition to Homey. The thing operated on a Raspi, has 0% failure and all devices can be used as if they were directly connected to Homey.
Do you use a Fritzbox with repeaters and mesh? If so, switch off mesh and automatic channel selection. Assign a fixed channel and see what happens. I bet that a WiFi is bothering your Zigbee! Unfortunately, the Fritzbox is known for it. Please ensure that the WiFi and Zigbee channels do not overlap and do not place Homey directly next to your router.

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Edit:
Do you use Steinel lights? They messed up my Zigbee mesh.