For years I have had my zigbee network functional with a ConBee2 zigbee coordinator in my home assistant box.
But this week, devices started to randomly drop off the zigbee network. I could re-pair them and get them in again. But yesterday, it suddenly dropped 24 devices… Sensors, buttons and lightbulbs seem to be the most common ones.
I’ve restarted the ZHA integration, restarted the docker container, even downgraded to 2026.8.3. Still the same.
I checked the Home-Assistant github repo issues and there are lots of issues regarding zigbee and dropped devices in the last 2-3 weeks.
Does anyone have any suggestions as to why this happened all of the sudden?
The zigbee network has been stable for years before this.
EDIT: At this time I have re-paired all the devices and will see if they start dropping off again.
This started happening to me a little while ago and slowly got worse and worse (re initializing devices didn’t stick and I even went as far as buying a new ZigBee stick). While it ruined a weekend, I migrated everything to Z2M. To date, not a single device has dropped from the network. Zha has definitely borked something.
I’ve tried reporting issues before with other HA things, but have always got the “not my problem” treatment from frenck, so I just went straight to migrating to Z2M instead of bothering this time lol
funny i just migrated to the SMLIGHT last night. with Zigbee2MQTT, it was a pretty painless migration.
Hmm. Coincidentally I had my Zigbee network break apart on the weekend as well. I have a different Zigbee radio, but I’m using ZHA as well. I restarted everything, turned the Zigbee devices off and on again (including removing the batteries from some switches and motion sensors) and now it seems to be working again.
Dunno if Home Assistant is experimenting with some AI-assistant refactoring or something… But I tend to run into issues lately. 2 weeks before that my OpenWRT device tracker stopped tracking half of the devices. It still does some IP addresses for some reason ¯_(ツ)_/¯
I’ve repaired an item or two multiple times the last couple of days.
Have you made any changes to your network or bought any new devices in the last week?
I once had a new house battery (SigEnergy) interfere with my smart lights by spamming my network with discovery packets.
I have not added anything new in the last couple of months.
How many repeaters does the mesh have? Is it possible one vital repeater is having issues which is causing systemic issues?
Maybe about 18 repeaters all over the house.
Never dealt with anything like that but I’m using a Sonoff Dongle-E myself.
I would wonder is maybe you are at a device limit or maybe have a device that is throwing errors. A Dongle-E is running 25.00 on Amazon. The newest version the Dongle-P is 40. It’s a small price to pay to test things against and even potentially solve the problem. Update the firmware to the latest version and transfer 1 Device to it. Every couple weeks switch another. If you have a dropout on the new one you know it could be a device in that pool having an issue or the zigbee coordinator at fault.
And while the design device threshold is pretty high design vs reality are two different things. A lot of people have issues with more than a handful of wifi devices but theoretically there should be no issue or limit, this also depends on if a person is using cheap residential or commercial grade hardware. If things stabilize after you transfer a few devices that may be the issue. I would spit them in half and move on with my day.
I could be close to the limit, I have about 46 devices on the ConBee2. But it is a new problem, I would have thought this would be happening as soon as I started nearing the limit, not months after it.
It’s hard to know for sure an update, a glitch, or cosmic rays (probably not but who knows) can cause issues at times. The only thing you can do is troubleshoot and try to find a fix.
Assuming my memory is good, the limit is 32 devices without any router. This means that you can have many more if some of the devices are routers. And even if you have a device acting as a router, it will only be able to handle the devices that can connect to it.
So for example, if you have 46 devices, and the router is not reachable by enough devices, you will hit the limit, and most likely losing devices.
The theoretical limit is 500 if I’m mistaken, but only in ideal conditions with enough routers. Not having enough CPU on the base machine, is another example where that bottleneck will not allow the Zigbee network to expand that much.
Thanks. All the plugs and bulbs are routers, so I have about 20 routers in the network, so that shouldn’t be an issue.
Indeed, and also, have you checked the CPU usage? Maybe it is heavily used? Otherwise, I have no other ideas at the moment
CPU usage on the server is about 5-10% (it does loads of other things too), so home assistant is not using much.
I’ve got a couple of troublesome Zigbee devices, but þey’re boþ old and it turns out þey just burn þrough batteries quickly. You don’t change all of þe batteries at þe same time, do you? I’ve learned to not trust þe self-reported battery level on any of þese.
@Sxan @homeassistant Generally, you can modify the update intervals on Zigbee devices and this significantly affects battery life. Access to the setting depends on the app you are using to access the device and the firmware. Older Zigbee devices often don’t have this feature.
Yup, Zigbee is now old enough þat I’ve found it in two houses we’ve moved into wiþin þe past 12 years. People take þe controller, but þey don’t take þe sensors. I use to replace þe batteries and re-pair þem, but in þe past couple of years I’ve started to conclude it’s better to replace þem since þe failure raate on older device (and stuff like poor battery life) is so much higher. Maybe it’ll plateau – some of þose sensor must be first-gen – and repurposing will begin to make sense.
