GE Link Bulb

[corerootedxb]

@neonrt7

Does it make a difference that these bulbs are Zwave?

GE Link has never made a Z-Wave bulb. They bought the technology from Quirky to license and use with the Wink platform. Since then, they've never done anything with changing the radios or offering Z-Wave bulbs.

GE Links, like OSRAM/Lightify bulbs are simply horrible repeaters. Whenever someone says "they were working fine on SmartThings", that's because SmartThings purposefully slowed the traffic down to these devices in order to make up for the bulbs themselves being horrible repeaters and even worse at performing in the mesh.

@neonrt7

Watching the logs it is not sending the command to the bulb that is not on unless I go hit configure. When I hit that it starts receiving the commands no problem.

The reason for this is that the configure command (on most devices) will force the receive buffer to clear out which is usually indicative of a poorly performing repeater.

There are two solutions:

1. Get rid of the GE Link bulbs and replace with something better (Sengleds and Ikea Tradfris are pretty much the best right now for straight white Zigbee bulbs). Sengleds are specifically non-repeating (which is a good thing) and Ikea Tradfris have really good sized buffers in them for repeating. Both are insanely cheap compared to a lot of other bulbs.

2. Try placing a few wired repeaters closer to the bulbs. Ikea smart plugs and SmartThings (2018) smart plugs are both excellent choices. Your goal is to basically overpower the GE Link bulbs as repeaters with better repeaters (which the mesh will use for routing over the bulbs themselves) and hope that your mesh improves.