Hello,
I’ve recently built a little enviroment with a Homey PRO and some Zigbee sensors, like light controllers, door sensors, light bulbs and power plugs (IKEA, SONOFF, TuyaZigbee and Lightify).
The total of Zigbee devices is 40+ (bit I’d like to add some more) and the distance between them is not big (around 90 square meters).
The homey keeps losing signal with all zigbee devices (or sometimes only with certain apps).
If I restart the relative apps (or the homey PRO) everything start to work again, but sometimes I need to restart the apps or the homey more than once per day.
Actually I set all the zigbee app to reboot every 2 hours and the Homey to reboot once a day or when there’s no one at home for more than 10 minutes.
In this way is mostly working but it’s not very practical and functional.
Is there any suggestion to solve this situation?
Thank you in advance
You can use the ZigBee developer page to see how many end devices (battery powered) are directly connected to Homey. If that exceeds 15-18 that can be the cause.
If that is the case, you can try to remove and re-add some of the battery powered devices close to a nearby router. Or, in the worst case, start all over again, first add the routers and thereafter the battery powered devices close to the nearest routers.
Thank you for the answer I’ll give a deeper look and report here. I’ve never used that page and I’m not sure (it shoul be only the devices that connect directly to node 0 (homey)) but it seems that I have around 11/12 devices directly connected to homey and most of them is not a battery powered device that can act as router.
Since Homey firmware 5, there is released a big ZigBee rewrite. ~aug 2020
Are the devices you used, paired before or after this rewrite?
Maybe it will help to reset your ZigBee network and reconnect the devices.
All the zigbee devices has been added from 2021 and the Homey pro was updated before adding them.
Tonight the zigbee network decided to reset itself (reported on the Homey timeline) and now most of the most of the modules (I think around 90%) are not working. I know that some modules will start again after powering them of and on but is not pratical for most of them like the switch ones inside the walls and the door/windows sensors. I looked deeply at the page suggested by @PetervdK and the actual devices connected directly to the Homey are 15. I think that a couple can be connected to another node repairing them but most of the other are very close together and close to the homey. Is it really that buggy Zigbee on the Homey or am I doing something very wrong?
A message that the Zigbee network has reset itself sounds strange, it shouldn’t normally do that.
If your Homey is still using its original Athom power supply, try replacing that with a better one: 5V, 2A minimum, preferably from a good brand.
It’s quite strange and honestly is the first time that happens, but at that time I was sleeping so I didn’t do that for sure.
Actually I’m using the regular power supply, I’ll try to see if I have a spare one with more amps. In the meantime I relinked all my devices after the reset…
A couple of questions:
Is there a suggested limit for connections on the other nodes that aren’t the homey?
I’ve read on this forum that some user suggest to migrate ZigBee to deCONZ and use the integration with homey. This option seems quite expensive (the 8gb raspberry pi4and the ZigBee antenna seems quite expensive) and I’m not sure that all my ZigBee devices will be recognized by deCONZ and its app on the Homey. Is that really more reliable and functional even through homey? (I’ve already made 60+ scenes ad I’d like to still use them)
How Zigbee devices connect to each other is not something you can control, so even if there was a definite limit, you wouldn’t be able to change it or somehow guide devices into connecting with a specific node.
I’m very happy with deCONZ, it’s very stable and has a much higher limit (1024, as opposed to Homey’s 15). I can’t really comment on how well the Homey app works, but I only read positive reactions from people that moved their Zigbee devices from Homey to deCONZ. You will have to fix your “scenes” (flows?) to make them work with the deCONZ-provided devices.
deCONZ itself doesn’t really use massive amounts of CPU or RAM resources, so you don’t need an 8GB RPi4 for it; a 1GB RPi3B+ is probably good enough. I run deCONZ in a Docker container on my Synology NAS, which is also a possibility if you happen to have one (or other hardware that supports running Docker or deCONZ directly).
I asked for a particular limit becaouse since some devices are very close to each other if one device is too close to its limit maybe pair one of its devices with another router could help (staying closer to anoher node or temporarily turing off the old node).
I’m sorry to say “scenes” on thee past years I’ve used a Fibaro HC2 with a lot of Z-wave devices (unfortunately they remained in the old house) and the flows are called scenes there 
I’ll have to repair a lot of flow but fotunately Homey shows a danger sign when there is a broken flow and I think that for now it’s quicker than recreate the flows on Home Assistant that I’ve installed some time ago but never learned how to use it.
I was considering a pi4 8GB since there is not much difference in term of costs between 4 and 8 GB (in the long term) and becouse searching for the suggested HW for home assistant (if not a docker image) a pi4 is always the seggestion.
I’ve a couple of QNAP (653D and 251A) that may be power enough to run it on docker but those NAS contain important data and they perform HDD tests during the morning and turn off at night to preserve the HDD life. For automation purposes I think it’s better to have a 24/7 running device.
If I’ll not able to solve those issues with Zigbee on Homey I’ll be forced to try deCONZ, is there a compatibility list?
The device limit seems very promising with deCONZ, I gave a look to its app on Homey and tried to add a device to se the devices list.
Some of my devices are present but not all especially Osram (lightify) and Ikea bulbs, 2 IN/OUT wall switches MoesGo (Tuya Zigbee) and a generic Tuya zigbee smart plug with energy monitoring.
I see that there is an option to add a generic device for each category but I think that it will not be possible to use advanced parameters like changing color on bulbs or using the energy consuption of th smart plug on flows…
Are you using deCONZ as a stand alone solution without interfacing it to Homey?
If you intend to run Home Assistant, you do need more RAM/CPU, but not for deCONZ alone. I’ve been using Home Assistant instead of Homey for a while now, very happy with it. It has a bigger learning curve, but it supports more features and more complex automations. It’s also much more open than Homey, so there are actual log files you can look at in case things go wrong. Plus custom dashboard.
You can look/ask around in the deCONZ thread to find out how much of your devices are supported. I think that if deCONZ itself supports the device, including advanced features, the deCONZ app for Homey will also support it.
Thank you for the suggestion, I’ll try to ask there for the devices compatibility.
Honestly I’d really prefer to continue using the Homey without start to decentalize sensors or migrating to another system (since my homey has less than one year).
If I understand right the only options I have to try to improve the zigbee network is to try another PSU an to pair again some devices to see if the 15 direct connection will decrease.
I hope to not have a defective Homey since it seem to me a pretty big usage limit (considering the number of sensor and the distance) for a device of this price range (I know that professional automation devices cost way more than that but being able to use 40+ devices is not a professional use case i think).
On my old HC2 I had around 80 zwave devices and never had problems like that (even if there were other kind of problems)
Like I said, the Zigbee backend resetting itself spontaneously is strange, I don’t think I’ve ever heard about that happening. It may be solved with a different PSU, but if not, it may be faulty Zigbee hardware for which you would have to contact Athom.
However, that’s unrelated to the 15-directly-connected-devices limit, to “solve” that you have to do some careful planning, by (after a manual Zigbee network reset) adding Zigbee router devices first, let the network settle for a bit, then add Zigbee end devices. That still isn’t a guarantee you’ll be able to add more than, say, 20 or 30 Zigbee devices. Some people don’t run into any issues and have 50, 60, 70 devices in Homey’s Zigbee network, some run into issues even before the limit of 15 is reached, and some have a nice and stable Zigbee network until they don’t, for no apparent reason.
The strangest and scariest thing is the self reset of this night but honestly it never happened before (I’m using homey pro from around a year now) I reset the network only once before while starting to experiece Zigbee issues for the first time when I restored a previous backup…if it happens again I’ll have to contact Athom support for sure. Maybe it’s unrelated but after a while (some hours) Homey updated its firmware to 7.2.0
It seems to be very aleatory usign Zigbee on Homey, I’ll probaly try to add again some devices as you suggested to see if something change in better and in the worst scenario I’ll evaluate to move some zigbee devices to deCONZ and leave the ones that aren’t compatible on Homey but I’ll have to see how this kind of solution will work to understand if it’s reliable on the long term…
If nothing will help to get a more stable network maybe the only real solution is to accept to have thrown away the money to buy a Homey pro and try to learn how to use Home Assistant…
Thank you for all the suggestion and ideas, I’ll report my resutls they may be helpful for someone in a similar situation 
Is Tuya Zigbee compatible with Ikea? I’m curious what the developer zigbee overview looks like.
And, keep the Wifi channels separated from the zigbee one(s). It could be interfering.
Zigbee & WiFi interference check:
http://ostgardh.se/wifi_zigbee/index.html
Maybe I’m not understanding the question or I didn’t explain well, both tuya ZigBee and Ikea are connected to Homey so they’re working together since both are compatible with Homey.
Thank you for the link, I set my fritzbox to automatically decide which channel to use with every wifi signal (2.4, 5.0 and wifi6) but I’ll check if the actual one can interfere with the ZigBee one
Anyway here’s the developer zigbee overview, acutally a couple of sensors are without battery because I pairing again some devices:
Thanks for the overview. There’s an Ikea router [7] connected to a Tuya router [19], so it seems to be compatible with eachother, that is info I didn’t know up 'till now, and the mix doesn’t seem a problem.
Sometimes zigbee Brand Y is not compatible with Brand Z, even though both can be compatible to Homey.
Ahh now I understand, the devices that seem to dislike the other brands are the Osram ones on my network
