My microwave knocked my Zigbee sensors offline every lunch, and one channel change fixed it
My router took the blame first, and it was innocent.
For about three minutes each weekday, typically between 12:40 and 1:15 p.m., the Zigbee sensors in the author's Home Assistant system went offline. The kitchen motion light, balcony door sensor, and counter plug were all affected. The author initially suspected the router, as both Zigbee and Wi-Fi share the 2.4GHz spectrum, but the router was found to be innocent.
The real culprit was the microwave reheating the author's lunch. The fix was to change the Zigbee network from channel 20 to channel 15. The oven itself was not broken; the issue was that the network landed on channel 20 in the first place. The author discovered this by reviewing the logbook and noticing that nine of the last 10 weekdays had the same short gap around lunch, coinciding with the microwave's operation. The author moved the Zigbee network to channel 15, which resolved the issue.
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