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Home Assistant started to be glitchy after two years (self.homeassistant)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by iMike to c/homeassistant

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I’ve been happy with my setup for two years, I’ve got 15 devices, ikea light bulbs, ikea switches and motion sensors, it all works perfectly until last month or two.

Motion sensors start to change the status to “clear” which triggers the lights off while I’m still moving in the kitchen and bathroom.

Quite often now lags happen between motion sensor switching on the lights or the switch turning lights on or off - it always used to be instant.

My setup is not the newest as I’ve got RaspberryPi with CC2531 but I’ve been running old software all that time so that’s not the case, I’ve only updated everyone now hoping it will fix my issues but that didn’t help…

I know probably you will say I need to check logs but did anyone experience this?

I don’t use my setup for anything else like Plex Server or FTP etc…

That’s some examples errors I found when I was using ikea switch to turn the lights on.

Is it best to have HA on Windows instead using different dongle like SkyConnect?

Update: Thanks to @[email protected] for pointing me in the right direction. Somehow I never considered interference to be an issue. Recently I bought a Google Wi-Fi mesh system (pack of three) and I didn’t realise it could have caused interference with zigbee… I changed the channel from the default 11 to 25 and the whole setup is working perfectly again! I also moved the RPi closer to most of the smart devices and I’ve put the USB coordinator on an extension cable but I’m 99% sure the channel 11 was the main issue.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Is it best to have HA on Windows instead

No, certainly not.

Could you be having issues with the batteries in the motion sensors? You could also try setting up your zigbee network from scratch, although that is obviously annoying.

[–] iMike 1 points 1 year ago

I was thinking that too but it doesn’t look like it’s batteries. In the past the motion sensors would die without this wired behaviour, now the batteries were like at 20%, I put fresh ones in but it didn’t help…

I’ve been running core-2021.8.6 before, now I installed the newest version on new microSD, it was annoying to when restoring a backup as I had to restore Zigbee devices separately and also the automations didn’t transfer, then the devices wouldn’t show in HA despite showing in Zigbee2MQTT…

I’ve got it all working now but the lag still remains.

I’m guessing it’s maybe the USB sniffer being old and breaking down?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

I've definitely not experienced this and I use a CC2531-based network in a very large home with about 40 zigbee devices. My setup was originally deployed for Zigbee a few years ago and has been pretty reliable. A quick Googlin' indicates that the MAC access error can be caused by WiFi interference though. Have you tried changing the zigbee channel?

EDIT: Meant to include the link to the zigbee docs about the Mac access error you're seeing. https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/guide/faq/#common-error-codes

[–] iMike 2 points 1 year ago

This might be it actually, I’ve bought google Wi-Fi mesh with three access points about a month ago, two of them are running in ethernet backhaul mode but one is not, I wouldn’t be surprised if this was causing interference…

Thanks for this, I’ll look into it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I second this. 2 updates ago I got a repair warning stating my Zigbee and Matter were using different channels. During that time I noticed delays with my devices. As soon as I put them on the same channel I noticed an immediate improvement. But I am using Skyconnect as multi-protocol so this may differ from OPs setup.

[–] iMike 1 points 1 year ago

Many thanks for the suggestion, I changed the channel from 11 to 25 and it’s working perfectly again!

[–] QHC 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

In my experience, almost all stability problems I've had with Home Assistant are either due to the devices (not HA or the hardware I'm running it on, individual lights and switches, etc) or dead batteries in same.

What protocols are you using for your devices? Zigbee, Zwave, Wifi, something else?

[–] iMike 1 points 1 year ago

It’s not batteries as I swapped them all.

I don’t think it’s the devices I think it affects all of them, unless ikea released some buggy firmware.

It’s all Zigbee devices.

[–] MajorHavoc 4 points 1 year ago

The error message is a timeout. That implies a few things:

probably nothing wrong at the controller. Timeouts aren't the controllers fault.
of course, something must be wrong at the device
or in between

Since you ruled out obvious stuff like batteries and updates at the device...

I would check in between - check the connectors of any network cables involved. For anything wireless, also check if there's a device priority table you can prioritize your controller in. I would also try turning off a few devices to see if there's just too much traffic on the network.

Source: That image contains a stack trace. I am fluent in stack trace WTF. Timeout means the message was sent and there was no timely no response.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I've had janky things start happening when my Pi started to run out of resources. For me it was my daemon.log on the Pi getting full of messages from HA. Once I deleted the log (there was a bunch that were saved old logs there too) my Pi worked good again and all the delays i was experiencing with my lights went away.

What I did was found a Linux command to find the biggest files on my system after working out that I had no memory, then using that list to track down the files taking up all my space.

Hope that helps

[–] Lightning66 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I know this is silly. But did you try restarting the server. Or updating it ?

[–] iMike 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I did, multiple times, I installed newest HA on a new microSD card, restored a backup but the lag is still there…

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Maybe your SD-card is giving up? For example: https://community.home-assistant.io/t/rpi-sd-card-reliability/232115

[–] iMike 1 points 1 year ago

That’s what I thought too. I’ve installed HA on a new SD card, restored the backup but the issue still remains…

[–] Falmarri -1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Why would you want to run HA on Windows?

[–] iMike 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I’ve got a laptop running 24/7 anyway so I could just set up HA on it. That way I’d have HA on a new device, maybe it would run better than on my old RPi2 and I wouldn’t have to spend money on new RPi.

[–] Falmarri -3 points 1 year ago

Why would you want to run HA on Windows?