#Is Zigbee range in practice much shorter than on paper? Better diagnostics

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covert girder
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Is Zigbee range in practice much shorter than on paper?
Because I've got tuya 16A zigbee plugs with line of sight to the coordinator and they still have a poor LQI. One is 20feet away on the same floor with 36 LQI. I've tried a couple channels in zigbee2mqqt. I don't have any overlapping wireless networks broadcasting so I don't really know what the issue is or if I should just... expect that? I have 15 devices and 4 are under 50 LQI. My best device score is 99.
I'm using a zstack 3.0 usb coordinator based on the TI CC2652P and Zigbee2mqqt.
I have a channel 1 and 11 wifi network and seem to have my best link quality with zigbee set to channel 18.

Is there a way to review more signal quality details outside of the LQI summary to see where any problems are? Better ways to improve this?

My battery devices absolutely drink batteries and I would love to understand what's going on here more.

stray halo
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That LQI is weird. I don't think you know LQI to which of the nodes is reported, and I don't think it's always the best one. In a good mesh they are all connected to them all and the data feeds in ways you might not expect.

lofty latch
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what sort of battery powered devices are you using? in general battery life is consumed most by the act of sending radio transmissions, so stuff like having a fast reporting interval on sensors will eat batteries faster, and having radio issues that mean it has to retransmit will too.

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whether you can do anything about the first issue depends on what the device is doing and what configurability the firmware offers. regarding the latter, make sure there's a permanently powered device nearby that can do relaying. some battery powered devices don't do a good job of automatically switching to a better "parent" device - re-pairing them using a specific nearby relay device can help.

covert girder
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I think part of what I'm trying to understand is how poorly the zigbee signal seems to propagate compared to a wifi signal. I only have 4 smart plug repeaters but it's only a 30x30 wood beam house with a couple floors, it's not a very large coverage space.

When I look online I see LQI scales to 255. I think a device 3 feet away would barely break 100.

lofty latch
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again - ignore the absolute LQI numbers. you can't really derive any meaning from them, especially between devices from different vendors (tho some vendors might document how they're calculated). But zigbee uses very low power compared to wifi, plus many devices end up intentionally using antenna designs with low gain so the signals don't have much directionality, so it's expected that the signals won't travel very well.