C8 Pro Zigbee light problem

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1

Hardware: C8-Pro
Platform Version: 2.3.9.180

I hate having to but the group for help, but myself and two others that I would consider to be very advanced Hubitat users have looked at this and we are all scratching our heads on this one.

Scenario:

Most all rooms of my house are motion light activated. Mix of Zigbee (all same model) and Zwave (all same model) motion sensors. All bulbs in my house are either Philips Hue or Sengled (non-repeating). 9-12 months ago I replaced my hub with C8-Pro and rejoined all devices. I have owned 2-3 of every generation of hub up to the C8-Pro. When I rejoined all zigbee devices, I joined the repeating smart outlets, starting with at the hub and working my way distance wise out from there, until all smart outlets were working well. Then added bulbs in same fashion. I would have to look, but I have 8-10 mains powered repeaters.

Motion lighting app runs all my motion routines.

Starting several months ago, I have 4 rooms, (Office, Kitchen, Stairs, Laundry Room) that are unreliable at best for triggering lights to turn on with motion.

Behavior of the problematic rooms:

Kitchen: First thing in morning, regardless of time, lights do not trigger on with motion. If I have Alexa turn them on, they all come on, and they work 75% of the time for the rest of the day. This room has a z-wave motion sensor with sengled bulbs. Often not all of the nine bulbs come on. 100% success rate getting the lights to respond via alexa or via turning them on manual via hubitat interface using their group. Lighting by mode not used

Stairs: Works about 1% of the time. Zigbee Motion sensor, Sengled Bulb. 100% success rate getting the light to respond via alexa or via turning them on manual via hubitat interface using their device page, or using button controller.

Office: Works about 50% of the time. The rest of time, no lights come on or only 1 of 3 bulbs in the group. Zigbee Motion sensor, Sengled Bulbs. 100% success rate getting the light to respond via alexa or via turning them on manual via hubitat interface using their device page, or using button controller

Laundry Room: Z-wave motion sensor, Sengled bulbs plus smart plug. Lights often turn off but will not turn back on after motion resumes, often for at least an hour. 100% success rate getting the light to respond via alexa or via turning them on manual via hubitat interface using their group.

Things that have been tried or proven to be true:

  • Other rooms with Sengled lights in groups work normally from button controllers that have no motion sensors
  • All bulbs have been reset and added back, to no avail
  • lights always respond to any type of manual control
  • Logs show motion active detect, and that lights were commanded to turn on, though they often dont
  • All rooms with Z-wave motion sensors and Philips Hue bulbs work flawlessly
  • This configuration has worked for 6-9 months without issue
  • Have used rebuild zigbee network option several times without any improvement
  • Checked to make sure Philips Hue hub and hubitat not on same zigbee channel
  • Change Hubitat zigbee channel
  • Tried using room lighting instead of motion lighting app, same behavior
  • Rebuilt light groups, no improvement
  • Changed motion lighting rules to command bulbs individually instead of groups, no improvement

Baffling part is the logs show motion detected, lights commanded on, but lights wont reliably come on. Lights come on 100% of the time by any trigger other than motion. Why oh why??

I welcome any insight.

Ron

Please provide your hub model (C7, C8, etc.) and its platform version from Settings>Hub Details.

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2

Have you tried changing the Zigbee signal strength? If you have a sufficient number of repeaters, then lower would likely be better than higher… but might be worthwhile to try a few options.

Are the same bulbs always having issues, or does it appear to be random?

In my experience, mesh issues can be inconsistent, where sometimes it will work and sometimes it won’t… so based on your description, it feels to me like that could be the source of the problem. Maybe one of your or a neighbour’s wifi router is causing some interference?

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  1. What driver are you using with your Sengled bulbs?
  2. Do the bulbs turn on if you only send a “level” command, or do you need to send an “on” for them to turn on?
  3. Are you manually turning them on from each individual device page, or from the group device?
    Just a couple thoughts since you stated 100% reliability with commands from the device page.
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  1. I would have to check on the bulbs, as I have several generations, but it would seem if the driver works to turn on the bulbs by every other method that motion should work too.
  2. I took your advice and tested, the bulbs do not need an on command. They work 100% of the time during testing with either turning them on by level command or by on command.
  3. Using Group Device
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5

I can see what you are saying but it is the same rooms with issues every time. Though the model of Sengled bulbs is different between rooms. Zigbee mesh inconsistency seems unlikely since the motion routine does not turn on the lights reliably but seconds later doing it by voice command or battery powered button switch seconds later works always. I work as a Network Engineer specializing in enterprise Wifi and have checked for wireless interference and find me, plus my closest neighbors are about 300 yards away.

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Another thing to check is Zigbee channel #. Channels 15, 20, 25 are usually best due to the potential for WiFi interference. 2.4 GHz WiFi should be set only on channels 1, 6, 11 with 20 MHz width. If you live in an urban environment your neighbors' WiFi is a potential source of interference.

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7

Here are two separate lines of inquiry you could explore.

  1. Database/software corruption. Perhaps something happened at some point to corrupt the device database and/or rules/groups data. A database rebuild is one way to explore this possibility, although I am no expert in this area. Another way to explore this is to delete and recreate all the groups and rules, perhaps starting with a single room, testing a rule with one bulb first, then create a group with two bulbs, then add a third bulb to the group and so on.

  2. Faulty device. I have had a misbehaving device present unusual symptoms seemingly unrelated to the device. Exploring this idea could be done by powering down all of the bulbs and motion sensors in the rooms that are not working. Then pick one room and powering up devices in a stepwise fashion and testing the rules/groups as each device is added I.e. - add the motion sensor and test, add one bulb then test, add a second bulb and test, etc.

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Considering what you have shared, I would first try doing a reboot with the rebuild database option checked. Second, are the lights turned off by means outside of the ML rules? In my ML rules I have painstakingly ensured that any way I use to turn off lights in a ML rule is addressed in the rule. This way the app knows that the lights have been turned off.

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  1. I will try the database rebuild. Tried that quite awhile ago to address this but cannot hurt to try again.

As for the other ideas, none of those address the fact that the lights turn on fine by any trigger other than motion, which is being logged as triggering the appropriate rules. A faulty device would not make the rule malfunction only due to a certain type of trigger, at least in my mind... None of this makes any sense....

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Post a screenshot of one of your problem Room Lighting rules.
And if you have the bulbs in a separate group post a screenshot of that group as well.

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I would also add that if you are on channel 20 for your zigbee, move to 25. For some reason 20 has been problematic for a lot of people lately (including myself). Moving to 25 cured everything.

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The neighbors misconfigured wifi is why I chose zigbee channel 25 for my zigbee devices. As an unrelated side note about nonsensical neighbor wifi settings, I moved my 5Ghz wifi to channel 165 at 20Mhz. This channel does not participate in 80Mhz and 160Mhz wide channels which everyone seems to think is the way to go. Many home routers will not even tune that channel. We are better off with less bandwidth on a clear channel.

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@ronggillis, I started having the exact same problems a few weeks ago with a C8 Pro and Sengled bulbs. Running the latest Hubitat software.

I'm testing the suggestions in this thread. Thanks all.

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Update:
I think I have it fixed, but not a short answer.

I noticed several things things popping up in my logs once I turned logging on for all devices (150+). I use many of the Sage by Hughes zigbee light switches. I was seeing the logs getting spammed by phantom button presses. That were non-stop turning lights off, that were not even on, even when no one is home. Using the zigbee mapping tool, I was able to trace it back to group of repeaters I had in another room. I unplugged all the suspect zigbee outlets that were repeaters. And like magic all my problems went away. In the end, I think one of the 5 outlets I unplugged is defective and just endlessly repeating like a broken record. All the lights that had issues were using those repeaters. Time will tell if this resolves the issue, but its been days. That is the best it has been in 9 months. The lights all work normally, the sage switches no longer logging phantom button presses.

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What brand outlets are they?

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THIRDREALITY Zigbee Smart Plug with Real-time Power Monitoring

Hoping just one of them is the offender, but I am so mad at the 9 month headache they caused I just want to take a claw hammer to them all. One a positive note, another day has passed and all lighting working as expected. In fact, one bulb that I thought was dead in my kitchen about 9 months ago and just have not replaced, now works perfectly lol.

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The TR devices get firmware updates often, you could also see if they have any updates. (Click Update button on device page and watch the logs). That one especially was very chatty on some of the older firmware and they have been slowly fixing it with updates.

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