I've been going down the Home Assistant rabbit hole for quite a while now, automating various aspects of my home, setting up custom integrations with HACS, and building up a Tailscale reverse proxy system to be able to access it remotely whenever I want to. With that, I also discovered Zigbee, a wireless protocol that countless sensors and smart devices support. I've now gone down another rabbit hole with that, and I'm starting to buy sensors left and right to automate my home.

Right now, I've got a motion sensor, a door and window detector, two temperature and humidity sensors, a smart light bulb (with more on the way), and a smart knob that can be turned and supports button presses. It's pretty crazy what you can do and how much a Zigbee network can transform your home, and I suspect I'll have even more ideas in the future.

What is Zigbee? How can I use it?

First and foremost, Zigbee is a wireless protocol supported primarily by IoT devices. Zigbee is its own network, meaning that it runs separately to your Wi-Fi, and devices connect to your Zigbee gateway (via a Zigbee coordinator dongle) directly. Your NAS with Home Assistant and the Zigbee Home Automation (ZHA) integration can act as a Zigbee gateway so long as you have a coordinator. You then connect devices to Home Assistant, and they'll report their data and any event changes using it as a hub to forward those commands to other devices.

With that said, while I started with using ZHA in Home Assistant as my primary gateway software, I quickly ran into issues with devices pairing and losing connection. I eventually switched to Zigbee2MQTT (Z2M), with the MQTT Home Assistant integration pulling the data from a database instead. This has been significantly more stable, and Z2M boasts wider compatibility as well with devices, though ZHA has better compatibility with dongles.

There's a lot of learning that goes into configuring your own Zigbee network, so I recommend doing a lot of research before you go all-in. You'll need to make sure you buy the right coordinator for your setup, and you'll need to make sure the devices you want to pick up are supported by Z2M or ZHA, depending on which method you decide to go with.

How Zigbee improves my smart home

There's a lot of data exposed with Zigbee2MQTT

I bought a Sonoff Zigbee coordinator a few weeks ago alongside a couple of temperature and humidity sensors, putting one in my living room and one in my bedroom. I get regular reports of the temperature and humidity conditions in both areas in my Home Assistant dashboard, and I can automate certain processes based on what they report. For example, I leave my window open in my bedroom during the day, and if it gets too cold in the room, I can get a notification that the room is too cold and to close the window.

Pairing that with a window sensor, I can see if my window has already been closed, so if it gets too cold and my window is already closed, I can get a notification to turn on the heat. If I had a smart dehumidifier (sadly, I don't), I could make it so that it switches on if the window is closed and the humidity is too high. There's already a lot of potential with just the one sensor, which is why I opted to buy even more Zigbee-related items.

Next, I got a human presence detector, and it does exactly what it says. It detects if a person is in line of sight, which has a few advantages. With one in my room, I can automate it to turn on the light in my room if it's past a certain time (or if a condition is met, like if the sun has set) and it detects a person at the same time, as that would be me entering my room. This saves me from having to say, "Alexa, turn on the light," which isn't really a problem but is still nice to have. As well, the smart knob can then be used to increase or dim the brightness, and I can set button presses to initiate certain tasks or change the color of the light.

Finally, I got a Xiaomi Temperature and Humidity monitor clock. While I haven't set it up yet, I'll replace the temperature and humidity sensor in my bedroom with this, and it can take over the functions that I was using the other for. I can then put it somewhere like my bathroom or my spare room, and the Xiaomi monitor clock will also serve as a bedside piece that can tell the time, temperature, and humidity on a physical screen in front of me when I wake up.

These are all very simple sensors, and there are so many more that can be deployed depending on the type of home you have. There are smart thermostats that can control your heating, there are radiator dials, water leak detectors, and even gas controllers. Zigbee2MQTT has a fantastic list of supported devices, and scrolling through the list can give you some ideas of things to implement in your home. It gives you a lot more control than ZHA does, too, and I highly recommend using it if you want to get really into home automation.

Right now, adding Zigbee to my home has been one of the best things I've done here, and it's changed my home significantly. It's also very basic, but the power of these basic devices is immense. I'm really excited to add more and more devices and get as much information as I can from my home. It's relatively inexpensive to get into, too, with the coordinator that I use (Sonoff Zigbee 3.0 USB Dongle Plus) costing less than $40 at the time of writing.