I’m experiencing some difficulties with reaching outdoor ZigBee sensors. Plus, we’ve built an atelier in our garden, which is roughly 20m away from the house.
Which is better: to have a seperate “outdoor” network with a dedicated coordinator? or try to place routers near the windows and have one network with all devices? I mean, I’ve got decent Wifi connections and the atelier will get LAN, so I easily can just add a seperate zigbee2mqtt for outside network? or does it interfere with the inside network using the same frequencies?
not a proven expert, but anyway: Everything operates on 2.4 GHz (with a little 5Ghz for wifi maybe), so no matter how you do it, it’s all in the same pool. Zigbee is actually designed to free you from architectural considerations and organize itself as a mesh. In my experience that works well as long as the routers have sufficient software quality. I use switchable plugs, since I need them in many places in the house and garden anyway and so they have a second function for the mesh.
For a stable mesh every signal should have more possibilities to reach the coordinator, so maybe consider not only one path to the garden. Make sure your routers always have power connection. Otherwise zigbee has to reorganize and that fails sometimes which means devices have to be readded.
I have multiple controllers(coordinators) in my environment one each that runs on the ZigBee binding on 2 different OH installs and one that is attached to a zigbee2mqtt instance what I did to prevent interference was to change the channels on each of them to be on different range of the RF spectrum. I have no issues at all and have routers bouncing the 3 different mesh networks across the property. I also use switchable outlets as well as some thoughtfully placed ZigBee Hue bulbs as my routers to boost signal in the areas that are distant. It is also important to mention that end devices can only be attached to one controller(coordinator) at a time so if you join it to a controller(coordinator) and another controller(coordinator) is on same channel it will not respond to the events but you may see unexpected behaviors and performance hits similar to what you have in congested areas where 2 Wi-Fi routers are trying to broadcast on same channel in close proximity to each other i.e. intermittent drops and slow transfer speeds
Thanks for the thoughts so far. Perhaps “frequency” was the wrong term here, but channels.
I don’t know, if this one is correct, but perhaps useful. Found it just now:
Time for some planning as I already use a WiFi mesh. So I’ll try to stay to one connector and try to minimize the Zigbee channels needed.
