Our Aqara W100s went deaf exactly 24 hours after pairing
All four doorway W100s went deaf to their buttons, and it traced back to a 180-second window in the Zigbee radio library.
The +/- on all four doorway W100s only blinked the setpoint, nothing made it to Home Assistant. This started the night A doorway thermostat for our Mitsubishi heads went live, when I paired two more units and rewired them all to drive the Climate Coordinator’s room thermostats. The units are on ZHA via W100 device support. HA could still write to the screens, but the displays were deaf to their own buttons for ten days or so.
It was a great example of patient debugging and using agentic probes and monitoring for this purpose: verbose logging and captures, analysis and trial and error. Since we had multiple devices, we were able to set a few canaries to see what the root cause was.
We had a few theories early on, each of which seemed plausible for a day: the two days of Auto pushes; the HA restarts; the W100s live for about 24 hours after the last press. We tested them by varying one thing per unit, from re-sending the thermostat-enable frame every six hours (re-enable unit) to doing nothing (control unit). All 3 died 24h after joining +/- 2 seconds, regardless of what we did to them. So the clock starts at pairing, and has nothing to do with the buttons.
The captures showed exactly a 24-hour dropoff by the units. We saw, after enabling detailed captures on the ZHA side, that the devices were asking for a descriptor at that exact second. Then an analysis of the library’s response of Lumi showed what we were looking for all along.
bellows (the radio library) reports the coordinator’s manufacturer as Lumi to the Aqara device for 180 seconds after joining, then switches back to Silicon Labs. The W100 re-queries a day later, sees Silicon Labs, assumes no Aqara hub, and drops thermostat features. Zigbee2MQTT does the same switch during Aqara joins, because Lumi devices otherwise lose features. This explains why resets/restarts never helped.. the coordinator’s claimed identity never changed.
I wrote a little custom HA component (in my config repo) to permanently keep the coordinator pretending to be Lumi, since the W100s do this check every day. The ones that were already wedged didn’t self-recover, so I did a 10-press reset on each. A few days later all four had passed the daily check and were responding again. I posted the cause and fix in my threads on r/homeassistant and r/Aqara, where I’d asked if anyone had ever seen the W100 go quiet like this when paired to an Aqara hub.
Next is reporting the 180s revert upstream. Now that we have figured this out, we will likely add a couple more W100 units to the house since they are awesome devices. They do exactly what we were looking for, which was replacing the OEM remotes and having bidirectional communication with HA.