I've been moving over to HA (Home Assistant) -- consolidating onto it, and it's been a total nightmare. The platform itself works OK, but the Zigbee implementation using ZHA (Zigbee Home Automation) is a bit of a disaster. I'm using the ZBT-2 for Zigbee, their official radio. 1/many

January 23, 2026 - 01:18 UTC

9
0
37
you should move to matter. that’s the new hotness. right now you got old and busted 🤪
1
0
0
I have a border router on order. (For Threads) I'm slightly skeptical it's better but that's because I'm so brow beaten from Zigbee.

At least you can have multiple routers! Unfortunately a big move would be expensive. I've been using Zigbee stuff since 2012... So I have a lot of it.
0
0
1
Been using HA for around 5ish years with currently 16 zigbee devices using ZHA (mostly hue lights). Weird that I only get the occasional drop, and they usually resolve themselves. Only had to re-pair a few times, which I do find a huge hastle. Happy with HA but might switch zigbee to something else
0
0
0
I just got into home assistant, i've been pretty happy with it.. i need to look at some of the zigbee stuff though.
1
0
0
I'd avoid it, if you can. It's by far the worst system for adding devices. It's super unreliable. (Just inherently)
1
0
1
ZHA made me give up on HA, because by the time I got it half working I was sick of looking at it.
0
0
0
I used to have a ton of Zigbee issues with my original dongle. I switched to the Sonoff dongle and everything works so much more reliably.

Also worth noting, if you don't have your dongle on a USB extension, you definitely want to do that. Plugging directly into the HA machine is very unreliable.
0
0
2
Reject modernity. Embrace X-10 controlled by a 386.

In all seriousness though, that sucks. I wish companies would make sure that their stuff worked before selling it.
0
0
3
Zigbee2mqtt
1
0
1
I thought about it, but I just can't bare the thought of migrating 90 devices to have it behave the same.

I'm going to try moving (at least my lights) back to Philips Hue. Once that is done, I might move the sensors and battery things over to Zibee2mqtt and banish ZHA forever.
2
0
2
And with about 90 Zigbee devices, things are just pretty unstable. Every day a few devices drop off. I tried changing to "Source Routing" which is supposed to improve things, but it was much worse. In fact, about half of my lights broke, with error 3074, which is some routing error. 2/many
1
0
9
After leaving it to sit for half the day, things were so broken, so I went back to the stock "table routing" and now things mostly work again. All the Ikea and Philips lights are supposed to support "source routing" but clearly something is super broken. 3/many
1
0
9
What are you migrating from?

I am running openHab with most Z-Wave devices. I've been contemplating moving over to HA at some point since it appears to be a better looking solution, but your post here gives me pause on this.
1
0
1
Recently made the same switch with a mix of zwave and zigbee. I'd already moved to zwavejs on openhab and my zigbee network is small. For me the transition was quick, and it's been rock solid since. 40ish zwave devices and about 15 zigbee.
1
0
1