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The original was posted on /r/homeassistant by /u/End3r89 on 2025-04-21 04:34:45+00:00.
TL;DR: I'm posting this just to help anyone else who has been in a similar position to me, specifically when it comes to aqara devices. I tried many different things, but in the end the only thing that worked for me to get a stable network was getting an Aqara M2 hub on top of my zigbee routers/coordinator and bring all the aqara devices in through there and the homekit integration. Now everything has been solid and responsive for (so far) a week and counting.
Initially I had a Sonoff ZBDongle-P as a coordinator and a handful of thirdreality zigbee outlets. The coordinator was in the basement, thats where my server running a HA VM is. I had zero issues at this point, so I decided to add some door and window sensors and a few temperature sensors, did some research and figured the ones from aqara were the best to get with long battery life and decent reliability. I added a few around the house but immediately noticed that there were connection issues. By this point I had the third reality zigbee switches in lots of rooms throughout the house for nightlights and various other things (mostly to create a robust zigbee network since they are all routers themselves) but I was still having issues with the aqara devices constantly becoming unresponsive within hours of reconnecting and was starting to get frustrated.
I did some more research and figured the best thing to do was get my coordinator in the middle of the house, but couldn't do that with the existing coordinator. (At this point I've got a few more zigbee switches from companies like Leviton, Sonoff, and others, which are all fine, zero issues. Just still having issues with the aqara devices). I ended up getting the SLZB-06P7 POE coordinator based on reviews and for a while this seemed to help a lot, I was getting much more stable connections with the aqara devices. At this point I 25 other zigbee devices (most of them mains powered routers) in the network and 8 aqara devices. Once I had better, stable connection with them I figured I had solved the problem with the new coordinator, so decided to go all in and get a door/window sensor for all the windows and doors in the house and a few more temperature monitors so I could do two things: have an automation to turn on the bathroom fans when the humidity in the bathroom went above 50%, and prevent the AC from being turned on when there are windows open in the house.
Something unfortunately broke when I got above ~15-20 aqara devices. All of a sudden they started dropping out again on a regular basis. Now I took a deep dive into zigbee stability research and started doing all sorts of things... I have 3 unifi APs, one on each floor, and I set up 2 day tests with the APs running on different wifi channels, this never seemed to have any effect no matter what channels I set the APs to. I also changed my zigbee network channel, literally going from 1 all the way to 25 (I got seriously used to connecting all the devices literally hundreds of times for the 50 devices I had by now) and did end up having differing levels of success. Channel 25 ended up being the most reliable, but still had around 12 aqara sensors in various places around the house that just would absolutely not stay connected. I also tried ZHA with no more success than Zigbee2mqtt.
I ended up buying two more POE coordinators (SLZB-06 and SLZB-06M) to put as routers in various places around the house, but no matter where I put them it had zero effect on the aqara devices. Even when trying to pair the bad devices directly to a router that was strung on a long POE cable to be close to it for a test, the device would not remain connected to the network after a short period of time. This ended up being a waste of money completely...
On a side note for the POE SLZB-06P7 coordinator I noticed something very frustrating when I had power outage in the house. If there was a power blip the coordinator would sort of get lost and the ONLY way to reconnect it would be to physically unplug it and plug it into a different port in the POE switch. It's a unifi POE switch so you are able to remotely do a power cycle on the POE port, but this did nothing. If I was away during a power outage I would lose my zigbee network completely until I got back to the house to unplug the coordinator and plug it into a different port. EXTREMELY frustrating to figure this out... The only solution I had for this was to switch back to using my sonoff ZBDongle-P as the coordinator and just using all the POE ones set to router mode. The Sonoff zigbee coordinator is plugged into my server which is on a power bank so it doesn't lose power during a power blip.
Back to aqara devices sucking balls... The solution I eventually found when I was desperate was to just buy an aqara M2 hub and bring it in with a homekit integration. I watched this video to do it (). It's definitely less user friendly than bringing the device in directly with your own zigbee coordinator, but I've had zero issues with any aqara device ever since. The temperatures updating often, and I get door and window alerts within seconds of them opening now. It's been solid for about two weeks which was unimaginable a month ago.
I hope this is all done now, I've recreated my zigbee network so many times now that I think if something like this ever happens again i'm just about ready to burn the house down with me in it. Ok fine I won't do that but I might just throw everything aqara in a pile and burn it while dancing around naked and wasted. or something. Hopefully my trials and tribulations can help someone...
