It's been 2 weeks with HE and I've had 2 of my 10 zigbee ge link bulbs require reconfiguring. And I think I have a 3rd (sacrificial bulb to use as a trigger to turn off bulbs when power comes back on).
I recall running into this during the early days of ST, but honestly haven't had the issue in over a year.
Are others having similar issues? I saw a thread about a big zigbee fix coming but unsure if these issues would be included. I realize there are growing pains of a new(er) Platform, but the WAF is starting to get impacted (locks not always locking/unlocking, lights losing memberships).
If your GE Link bulbs are as old as mine, most likely they have begun to form some sort of condensation inside the bulb. This seems to eventually lead to the death of these bulbs. They were never really stable for me in all of the years I used them. When I moved over to Hubitat, they were no different. So, I bit the bullet and replaced my GE and Cree Zigbee bulbs with Sengled bulbs. They are very inexpensive and they are NOT Zigbee repeaters by design. This prevents them from screwing up the Zigbee mesh, but does require a few strategically placed Zigbee outlets around the house to help establish and maintain a solid mesh.
I had some GE Link bulbs on my HE hub for about 11 months. They behaved about the same as they did on ST. Every few months one would fall off and need to be re-paired and would jump back into its previous device slot. It was annoying enough after 3-4 years (on both ST and HE) that some good deals on Sengled bulbs were enough to make me to replace them. None of the Sengled bulbs have dropped their connection.
You don’t need to never buy another bulb again. Just buy bulbs that are still supported and are current technology. Those GE Links were an amazing deal at $15 a piece when they were released. But GE even stopped making them and they have always had many problems.
Completely fair. I’ll be on the lookout for good deals on Sengled. It might be good for Hubitat to pull support for things that exhibit unreliable activity. Otherwise, it’s setting expectations which won’t always be positive.
Once more question for you... How many Zigbee devices are on your Hubitat mesh? There is definitely an issue that causes devices to become unresponsive on large zigbee networks. Hubitat has been working with @srwhite for weeks now to understand and correct the issue. The fix is currently being tested as part of Hubitat Firmware v2.0.6 which is in Beta. It involved some changes to the Zigbee stack. I just wanted to mention this in case that might be the root cause of what you're seeing with your bulbs.
Yeah I saw his thread and was hoping the fix would help me. 15 Zigbee; all GE link bulbs. I guess I could replace them with Sengled and sell the old ones on eBay for pretty much same price (from just looking).
Just be aware that the Sengled bulbs are NOT Zigbee repeaters. You will definitely need a few zigbee outlets spread around your home to act as repeaters. I use the Lowes Iris 3210-L outlets. However, these are hard to find these days. Others have good luck with the inexpensive Peanut Plugs and Ikea Tradfri outlets.
Understood. Looks like the peanut devices work well. Most of mine are within 25 feet of the hub. Curious, if the power goes out, what do the Sengled bulbs do when power comes back?
Check out this thread about a neat feature of these bulbs...
Hopefully Hubitat will add the configuration command to their built-in drivers. Pretty cool that the Sengled bulbs can announce their status when being powered off and on via a physical switch.
This would be useful if the power blips in the middle of the night as you could have a rule turn them all back off, assuming your hub is on UPS.
