Experience with Sonoff Zigbee devices?

IOT (The internet of things) Zigbee's
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Hi all

I see Sonoff’s Zigbee devices are not badly priced, motion sensors, push buttons etc.

Anyone using Zigbee in their homes and is it solid or does it give problems?

Also, do I understand correctly that I won’t need a Sonoff Zigbee bridge if I get the HA Connect ZBT-1 USB stick to patch all Zigbee devices in to HA?

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I bought two door sensors. One failed within days. The other one’s battery went flat and I could not be bothered to replace it. The gateway is still on my desk.

Flashing it with Tasmota is tricky. There are two chips on the board, and both need new firmware.

But when it works, it does work quite well!

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Yeah kind of same sentiments as @plonkster on this one…

Its a love hate relationship for me, the batteries last pretty long but mine that are further away from my HA server with Zigbee dongle go offline quite frequently, I have flashed a Tasmota as a repeater and I think for the most part my probelm is that I don’t have any other wired Zigbee devices so there aren’t enough repeaters to keep the signal decent.

The Tasmota flashing on the repeater is a bit of a pain.

Moving house soon and will replace all of the Zigbee stuff, just not interested in tinkering with the stuff all the time anymore.

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I have gone through a few iterations of zigbee versions on my network.

Here is what I can tell you, if you want a solid working zigbee network:

  1. Stay away from the Sonoff zigbee bridge
  2. Stay away from the Sonoff zigbee bridge
  3. Sonoff zigbee dongle is …ok…but not preferrable
  4. Always prefer a Tuya branded zigbee sensor over a Sonoff one if you can. My worst performing, most issue causing zigbee devices, are the sonoff branded ones.

That HA Connect ZBT-1 USB stick should be fine. That said, zigbee is like wifi, it needs proper coverage. You do this by extending the network with repeaters. In zigbee speak, that is zigbee routers.

To extend your network, get yourself some LoraTap Tuya ZigBee 3.0 Signal Repeater from China. Yes it comes in slow via SAPO, but these are the best things ever I got for my zigbee network. They are tiny, plug in to any USB port you can find anywhere in your home, and they literally changed my zigbee network from wonky to just works(tm)

As for the coordinator, I got myself the ZigStar UZG-01 from UZG Gateway - ZigStar UZG
They shipped to my door using Buffalo which was great. This thing, with the LoraTaps, made my zigbee network work amazing with zigbee2mqtt though you can use the Home Assistant one directly if you prefer.

I now use all kind of sensors and buttons and it all just works.

So take my advice, steer away from Sonoff zigbee junk. They basic wifi switches work great, but they suck with their zigbee junk.

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