Turning off wireless at night

[Neter66]

Here's an interesting one... The wife asked today if it was possible to turn off all the wireless in the house at night.

As I have about 75 switches / dimmers / 3/6 buttons, that's a lot of wireless devices.

My gut tells me "no" it's not possible to turn off zigbee at night, but perhaps, is there a way to "lessen" the transmissions?

So here's my thinking... Zigbee devices need to communicate with each other. That's a given. But, is it possible to determine just how often the do communicate? For example, can I set the zigbee "ping" time to be several hours overnight, while setting it to be seconds/minutes during the day?

The goal would be to minimize the number of zigbee admin packets, thus reducing the time that the devices have their wireless turned on, thus reducing the time that they are broadcasting wirelessly.

I'm okay with making the changes at the OS / config levels of the controllers if there is no "supported" way of doing this. ie muck around with the zigbee server / coordinator settings and config files at the OS level.

What about turning off the coordinator / server at night? Or would that have the opposite effect of having the devices send more and more packets as they look for the mesh? Do they ever give up?

Thoughts? Am I out to lunch? Has anyone else thought of this in the past?

Thanks

D.

[RyanE]

Not really. Devices get a route request every so often, which they reply with an "I'm here", which ensures the ZigBee mesh keeps routes up to date.

If you were to remove the coordinator or ZAPs, you would see increased traffic initially, and then the nodes would 'back off', and look on different channels for the mesh. It would not stop the traffic, and may indeed increase it over the 'management' traffic that is always ongoing.

If you pulled the air gap on the switches, they would obviously stop transmitting, but you would also lose the ability to turn on your lights, even manually until you pushed the air gap back in.

None of these things are recommended, as the mesh is intended to just 'be' all the time.

Keep in mind also, that ZigBee signals are the least of your worries when it comes to RF... You likely have neighbors' WiFi signals going through your house (unless you live in the boonies) that are stronger than the ZigBee signals within.

RyanE