Add a lights hub to hubitat - Newbie

I have the kids use double tap to toggle their lights and another rule to keep the light switch on.

LOL
Now if only I had some bulbs to test that out on. :smiley:

I use it on my front porch lights also so someone doesn't turn them off between dusk and dawn. Same for my driveway lights.

And that is where we disagree. All of my lights are RGBW. They trigger on motion and set color temp based on time. Cool white in the morning and daytime, warm white in the evening and night. I also have special settings like gallery where the color temp is set between warm and cool for better color rendition on my photos and lights not pointed at pictures fill in the room with accent colors. In movie mode there are no white lights and only dim blues and greens.

The switches can't be controlled locally and the loads are not tied to any rules. The switch rules focus on overrides mostly. If a guest presses the living room on paddle it will turn on a preset white light scene. Special modes (gallery, movie) can override the scene with an on press and reset it with an off press.

I have my full control and there is still a user interface that is understandable to visitors. They can not disconnect a bulb at the switch.

The only place this falls down for me is if the hub itself fails since there is no local control. Although you can re-enable that by using the programming button on the Inovellis.

Since the first line of the OP was "I am completely new to IOT" I took it has he doesn't have any devices yet. :man_shrugging:

I've put all my lamps (Hue and Gledopto) on to the Hue hub. Since then my HE mesh (which is supported by IKEA repeaters) has improved. I link the Hue hub to the HE using the standard Hue integration. It works well although it relies on polling to the Hue hub to sync the lamp status in HE if you change it directly in the Hue app. So there can be a short delay in the 2 syncing to show the same status. This can be evident in the HE dashboard. So with this type of setup, it's best to activate all lamps from HE.

The only problem with Hue is that it sucks for multiple properties on one account. While you can add multiple Hue hubs into the Hue app, it's only possible to have the cloud (away from home) access to one of them. It really is an irritating clusterf##k of a mess.

Regarding the perennial argument of what is better, switches or lamps. The best solution is of course both. Because that will give you ultimate control. I tend to use smart lamps because I like Circadian Lighting and scenes with colour etc.

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Hi, i couldn't answer yesterday.

I know it would be better to use switches, but i was hoping i could use bulbs as well.

For instance:

When i get up at night (because a kid is crying or whatever), switch only half the lights in the corridor at 25%.
When someone enters home and does not press the button in 20seconds, switch on at 100% in red color all de light and start the alarm.

However, you are telling me i won't be able to use colors with a hue like the philips one, right?

Ok, so you have the hue hub with all the lights and it is linked with hubitat, which has everything else. Are you able to change colors in the bulbs? @bertabcd1234 said before i would lose that...

Another option i've read throught the forum is using groups to send the orders to the bulbs. What do you think about this?

That's true, i have nothing bought but my travelling hubitat.

Can you use colors in your rules?

I have both Smart switches/ dimmers and rgbw lamps. I'm now going to a 2 hub setup as I plan to expand and add energy monitoring sockets. There is no issue with having control from one hub to the other. When she use hub connect or link to hub the devices will be seen on the same hub. so in effect all your devices are in one place and can be controlled as if they are on one hub. If you use the Philips hue bridge you do not want to control it through its app you should only control it through habitats app. This is due to the polling mentioned above. Personally I don't like Philips hue you so I prefer to have secondary habitat hub as I get more from that. In my case I want two ZigBee meshes and two z-wave meshes because I want to separate old products from new ZigBee 3.0 and z-wave plus devices.

Yes, of course.

Yes, it's wise to use this (for zigbee which supports it) to reduce traffic on the mesh. It mostly works well and there are some optimisation options in HE to help address most issues.

All of this is easy with Hubitat!

Yes

In the above sample you can see several ways to set lights. In the yellow section I am setting a custom color (hue, saturation, and level). In the green section it is setting a default color, and in the blue section it is setting a white temperature based on the current mode.

There are more options but from this example you can see how flexible RM is.

Robert only said that there would be problems with Trådfri color bulbs. Probably related to the following:

Just use Hue or Gledopto with the Hue bridge and you will be fine.

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No, I was only pointing out a problem with the Ikea Trådfri bulbs. Philips Hue bulbs as well as every other third-party bulb I've used work fine--just the Trådfri ones don't. (There may be others, too, but this is the only one I've used or heard of that chose to implement their color model in this manner, which is not compatible with Hubitat's model.) This is true regardless of whether the bulbs are paired directly to Hubitat (as a regular Zigbee device) or used via the Hue Bridge integration. Color will still work in that latter case when controlled from Hue (but not color temperature, even though the bulbs support that on Ikea's software), but you won't get accurate reporting about the current color back into Hubitat.

Yep, that's the reason! :smiley:

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Are these the sengled bulbs you were talking about?

In some cases, one does not have a choice about using smart-bulbs.

In my situation, my home was built with MANY 18V relays that do the actual power switching to lighting circuits. The switches are all low-voltage momentary rockers that run back to the panels that hold all of those relays. Typically, the lighting circuits are for an entire room, so the only way to separate the lighting into groups is to use smart-bulbs and then group them.

Yeah, it sucks, but smart-bulbs are far less expensive than rewiring the entire lighting system in the house.

I have several SmartBulbs myself. Mostly from the early days of my adventure. They taught me exactly what I detailed above. Today, my family virtually never touches a light switch, so it would be rather easy for me to introduce a SmartBulb. But in those early days, all of us were used to using a switch, and only using a switch. It was so much grief for ME to run around and re-energize the bulbs. Ultimately I put them into lamp fixtures where I could unscrew the tiny knurled knob and toss it in a drawer. Those lamps simply can't be turned off any more, because the knurled knows are now lost.

Thus my advice stays the same, for Newbies: if you can avoid SmartBulbs.. avoid 'm. But clearly there are many that cannot avoid them.. and to those, I offer sympathy for being subjected to a cycle of 'fixing" light switches. :smiley:

Thought I would throw my two cents in here... first and foremost welcome to the HE community! It will solve your loose change and spare time issues for some time to come.

I generally also prefer dimmable smart switches instead of messing with bulbs. People do indeed tend to turn off the power to fixtures with smart bulbs in them. Sometimes you have no choice, though. To that end I have found a couple of handy things:

https://www.amazon.com/Lisols-Mind-Switch-Guards-Security/dp/B07RBTMG78/ref=sr_1_11?dchild=1&keywords=light+switch+cover&qid=1606770162&sr=8-11

and

I use a combination of Cree and Philips Hue bulbs. Cree where I am being cheap, Hue where I need color. I have lots of motion / mode rules that turn on only some lights on a circuit and sometimes in red. For instance, during the day if motion is detected in the bathroom go ahead and turn that light on a nice warm white at 100%. But at night let's just turn on one bulb and let's have it red at 25%. Can't do that with a smart switch.

All of my bulbs are on a Philips Hue hub because of the ZLL/ZHA repeating issues people have mentioned before, and the Hue hub is on a different zigbee channel than my HE. Generally I have found ZLL bulbs repeat other ZLL devices OK as long as they are kept powered on. But ZLL bulbs do not route ZHA devices very well at all, and create a mess of your mesh. The Sengled bulbs don't repeat, which is helpful in a mixed network. They will also not work on a Hue network.

For dedicated smart switches I use Lutron Caseta dimmers. They are proprietary and require their own hub but they are ROCK SOLID and - more important - do not require a neutral. Most others do. My house was built before the days of AC wiring and only the "new wing" of the house has modern wiring (though no knob and tube, thank goodness).

HE has excellent integration with both Lutron and Philips - but make sure you get the PRO version of the Lutron hub. All of my rules, modes, scenes, logic, etc., are controlled from the HE. The Lutron and Hue hubs are just a pass through. Whether the target device is on the Hue hub or the Lutron hub is essentially invisible once you get it set up. An added plus - the Lutron Pico remotes are pretty cool. Not only do they directly pair with a Lutron switch (mostly for 3-way switch installations) but they can be accessed from rules in HE and made to do fun things.