I have recently had a lot of zigbee devices going unavailable. In doing reading on troubleshooting I came upon the suggestion that wifi can drown out zigbee. My ST hub is sitting right next to my router. My hub is on 20 and I just moved my 2.4 network to channel 1. If I have read the diagrams I found on the forums correctly, that should keep them separated band wise. That being said, what do people do to separate the two devices physically? Just use a long ethernet cord or do people use some other neat tricks? I have my router and ST hub (and cable model and Tablo) all stuffed in a closet since they all require ethernet access. With some extension cords I could probably get about 3-4 feet of distance but it would get to be a gangly wire mess which my wife may not appreciate. Suggestions?
One thought I just had is I have a powerline adapter running from the router closet mess down to my PC which has an ethernet switch with a bunch of other devices connected. Would also be a cable mess there, but it already is, so my wife would probably be ok with that. That seem like an acceptable solution?
Sure anything that creates physical space between the two should be fine. I just use a long ethernet cable. You also want to keep it away from any Wi-Fi access point.
Microwave Ovens are a problem, too. Anything 2.4GHz is a problem. If you have a half-way decent wireless access point (I use separate APs from my router), they will periodically scan the frequencies and change channels if one gets congested.
Not sure of the internal antennas used on SmartThings (have not opened one up), but I would hope there are two or more to deal with multi-path distortion.
The problem here is that if you have things set up right, you will have very few, very short messages for Zigbee. At a frequency strength about one hundredth that of Wi-Fi. So it’s likely your Wi-Fi transmitters won’t even realize the zigbee is there. But the zigbee can get drowned out by the Wi-Fi when it does try to send a message.
Yeah, my router scans for interference and auto selects, but when I used an app on my phone to see what else was around I didn’t see anything that looked like ST to me. That would explain why. My router had selected channel 8 which didn’t seem the worst but channel 1 was clear so that seemed better.
Kind of unrelated, but the router doesn’t have auto select for 5ghz. Is that just my router or is there a reason auto wouldn’t work for 5fhz? I know it won’t interfere with ST but been thinking I may have 5ghz crowding on wifi with my neighbors which seems odd to me since 2.4ghz was pretty clear and I would have thought most routers use both.