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ZHA started randomly dropping devices (lemmy.linuxuserspace.show)
submitted 2 months ago by to c/homeassistant@lemmy.world
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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.

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[–] 1 point 2 months ago (6 children)

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.

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 2 months ago (5 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago (3 children)

    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.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 2 months ago (2 children)

    Thanks. All the plugs and bulbs are routers, so I have about 20 routers in the network, so that shouldn't be an issue.

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