I have four Cree bulbs in my house, all of which have been performing fine for years. A couple of weeks ago, one of them started a strange behavior where when my wife (of course, it's my wife's nightstand lamp!) turns the lamp off for the night, it doesn't go completely dark, but there is a very faint glow from the bulb all night long. She has to turn the physical switch off to get it to go black.
I've checked the device to see if it somehow got configured to dim to 1%, or something like that, but I can't find anything different with this device compared to the other three. Has anyone seen this behavior before?
My Cree bulbs all either failed or caused Zigbee mesh network problems. I removed all of them years ago.
@snewpy - I would suggest replacing the problematic bulb as those Cree bulbs are probably now 10+ years old. I remember when those were first released at a very reasonable price-point back in the day. I had a bunch of them, as well as GE Link Zigbee bulbs. I replaced all of those with Sengled bulbs directly paired to Hubitat. Later, I ended up replacing those with Philips Hue smart bulbs, paired to a Philips Hue bridge. I wanted the ability to control the power loss/restore behavior within the bulb to prevent waking up the house in the middle of the night after a power blip, as well as a means to integrate the bulbs with my Logitech Harmony Hub, Hubitat Hub, Apple Home, Amazon Alexa, and Home Assistant with native integrations. This combination has been 99.999% reliable for my needs.
Cree bulb weirdness aside, it still seems strange though, since it goes dark on a full switch. If the zwave control is truly not dimmed at a really low percent and really off, would still have to be some leakage through that to keep the cree bulb dim. Depending on the dimming control, there may still be some (really low) voltage at 'off' if they don't have a full switch/relay. I have seen cases with enough (really low) leakage current on the neutral (due to ground/neutral plane voltage differences) to (barely) light up power indicator lights.
Is the level being set to zero or is the switch being turned off? If it is the former, try testing switching it off instead. For the test you can do that directly in the device driver instead of changing any automation.
Not strange at all actually. Using the Aotech button, they aren't cutting power. They are telling it to turn of through Zigbee (not Zwave BTW). There have been reports of iffy firmware that cause the same issue. Regardless, unless they are on a dimmer circuit (most lamps don't have those), then there shouldn't be any leakage when power is physically turned off (hence, it doesn't glow).
There could be:
1- internal circuit leakage - which would indicate the bulb is failing
2- Firmware issues - but not that likely since other bulbs are working
3- Something wrong with the automation that it is dimming to some value other than zero (but apparently ruled out already)
On the reddit thread I found on the same subject, one fix was to turn the ramp time to 0 for the bulb. Something about the ramp time that it was never dimming to zero when the off command was sent. If that doesn't work, try sending a command to Dim to Zero (just for grins). If neither, my guess (and it's only a guess) is that it is just aging and needs to be replaced.
But you cant have that if the power is cut; so we're just saying the same thing. While the bulb itself may have started to pull some leakage, it cant pull from power that doesn't exist... so that automated switch/dimmer is not quite off in 'off'.
Power has never been cut…. The user presses a button on a Zxwave button controller, the HE hub sends a Zigbee command to the bulb, the bulb is supposed to fully turn off.
The only time the power was actually cut was when the lamp switch was manually turned off.
I had a TON of original CREE led bulbs... all Dumb bulbs . They were thru several iterations... and Cree (the company)sold off the led bulb business to someone else. So 'Cree' Bulbs are not Cree anymore. I don't remember the original company making smart bulbs.. but maybe I just wasn't looking at the time.
They did always honor the warranty though (as did the new owners of the brand) . I don't know if I ever got '10 years' (their original warranty)... but they always replaced them up through 9.5 years(I had one make it that far).
Sorry for the confusion. Since I've never seen a Cree bulb that wasn't a smart bulb, I didn't know they made dumb bulbs too. So I didn't specify in my original question, but these are all smart bulbs that I have.
Appreciate the responses! I'll be shopping for some new bulbs I guess...
I'd recommend consulting the Hubitat device compatibility list before you go shopping. There are a lot of newer bulbs that are now compatible with Hubitat. Including WiFi offerings from LiFX and Philips (WiZ).
exactly my experience as well.
