Up to about two weeks ago I used ZigBee bulbs and power plugs as repeaters. I lost devices from the network on average about three times a week. The lost devices included thermostats, switches and temperature sensors, all crucial for my use cases.
I then installed five IKEA TRADFRI repeaters in my home which includes three floors. From then on, I lost once two devices when I restarted the nymea box. No other devices ever were dropped from the network from then on. Everything is rock solid. It even seems that I could have done with fewer repeaters.
Binding the repeaters into the network was straightforward: open the network, plug the repeater into the outlet, press its button until its LED pulses. Nymea then immediately recognized the device. Change its name to reflect its location, and you’re done.
This is my current network. You can easily spot the repeaters by their names.
Thank you for sharing this. It is always good to know which routing devices work good in a Zigbee network.
The network map is a great overview for troubleshooting and helped me already in solving various problems.
I also had routing problems with lightbulbs. Some of them are sometimes not available in the network, as they can be switched off by the old hard wired switch and therefore have no power. This led to some problems as you can imagine.
To deal with this I currently splitted my former single Zigbee network into two Zigbee networks using two ConBee II on my Pi, which can easily be done in Nymea.
One network has all the lights/dimmers and the second one has all other things.
By this, I excluded the bulbs as routers for the other things and I use electrical plugs as routers, which work in my case. The TRADFRI repeater could also be a choice here, if I still had problems with the routers.
With this setup, I have no problems at all so far with the devices I use and I have two stable and responsive Zigbee networks.
Update: About half an hour ago two of the repeaters were disconnected from the network. A circuit breaker had turned off power in an entire floor of our home. I became aware of this because a magic cut in and lit a lamp when nymea reported something as disconnected.
I restored power to the floor in question, the repeaters reconnected to nymea within about a minute without any intervention and all devices appear to be connected again.
