I had a chance to try Zigbee extension lead sold by Lidl under SilverCrest brand.

Overall it's not a bad device:

  • I had no problems connecting it to the Home Assistant (via ZHA integration).
  • It works as Zigbee router.
  • It looks fine if a bit too long for 3 sockets.

I think it is an OEM Tuya device and there are probably other similar devices with Tuya internals

However I will be returning it for the following reasons:

  1. There are no local per-socket controls.
  2. It does not seem to support binding for OnOff Zigbee cluster.
  3. It is not designed for hanging it on the wall.

While there are easy workarounds for (3), the combination of (1) and (2) means that any command to control sockets would always have to go through my Home Assistant server and should that server be unavailable I will have no local control of these sockets.

I could solve (1) by adding external Zigbee buttons to control sockets, but these would still have to work via the Home Assistant and not directly due to (2) and overall would make the setup bulky and probably ugly.

Instead of this Zigbee extension lead I plan to use WiFi extension lead TP-Link Kasa KP303. It seems to still work fully locally with Home Assistant, and for a similar price has per-socket local physical controls and even looks a bit neater due to being more compact. It won't work as Zigbee router obviously but I plan to solve this by plugging a Zigbee repeater from IKEA into one of its USB ports.