I'm looking for advice on the best practice to use and he pros/cons of each.
I have several groups of Osram Zigbee lights that are controlled directly by HE with group messaging turned on each group.
If I wanted to control all 6 of my downstairs groups, would it be better to create a new downstairs group with each of the individual bulbs and turn on group messaging, or to create a group that has each of the smaller groups instead of individual bulbs.
A group of groups, or a new group of all the bulbs?
To add to this, I assume I should not include the other groups if I am controlling the bulbs only within the downstairs group? Would this cause the virtual group to lose sync with the bulbs?
Either way, you're going to end up with things not matching the state of the devices. If you have a light as part of two groups it will become un-matches with group1 when you send a command to group2. For example, you set group 1 to 10% then you set group 2 to 20%. The bulb will be 20% because it's part of group 2 but group 1's master device will still be set at 10%. I would advise having any device only as part of one group. Then if you want to control all the groups, just go ahead and control them all, don't create another group.
Have you looked at using Scenes for any of the things you're trying to do? might be something to think about if you want to control a group of groups.
