Hi,
In my house I have about 25 Zigbee HA dimmers from Elko (owned by Schneider). The name of the dimmer is “Elko 316 GLED RF”. Since I first invested in these dimmers back in 2018, Elko has released new versions of the product under the same name, but which have other characteristics. The most important difference is that they are now Zigbee 3.0 certified. Most of my dimmers are of the first version, but 8 of them are of a later version, supporting Zigbee 3.0.
There is a device request for the general product here, now stale and closed: Device support request - Elko 316 GLED RF dimmer · Issue #2497 · dresden-elektronik/deconz-rest-plugin · GitHub
The ZCL version 1 dimmers are operating quite well in deConz. They are rarely dropping out of the mesh, and are actively participating in the mesh as routers.
The ZCL version 3 dimmers however are constantly dropping out of the mesh. Since the dimmers act as routers, them dropping out cause instability also for other devices, as these other devices will have to repair their path to the root. After I have repaired all the nodes in the mesh, it will take between 30 minutes to 3 days before the ZCL-3 dimmers to begin leaving the mesh again.
I have migrated from Homey where I had the opposite problem, where only the ZCL-3 dimmers were stable, the older ones acting out all the time.
The rest of the mesh consist of Elko Thermostats, Philips Hue lamps/bulbs/Motion Sensors/Remotes, IKEA Trådfri Motion Sensors/Remotes and Frient Open-Close/Temperature Sensors. In total there are about 100 devices in the mesh.
I have already removed all Aqara devices, as an attempt to improve the mesh. I have also tried to physically move the deConz-gateway, minimizing the WIFI-interference and moving from channel 15 to 25. But since the it’s mostly these newer ZCL-3 dimmers that leave the network I have concluded that there must be something wrong with their configuration, somehow.
I understand that mixing zigbee 1 and 3 is not optimal, but in my case it’s not an option to upgrade all my older Elko-devices as it is way too expensive. (And most of the Elko Thermostats are also ZCL-1)
I would really appreciate any suggestions on how I should deal with these dimmers. Should I register a new device request? Or are there any steps I should do to investigate the issues further? For instance, would the device report an error when leaving the network and how to most easily read the log?