Hubitat Scenes don't control all the lights

Hello! I installed the built in app for Groups and Scenes and created one each which have 4 Hue lights in them. It had them by default as bulbs I believe. One is an outdoor flood light and 3 are outdoor wall mounted ones.

The problem I'm having is 50% of the time when I turn a scene or group on, only some of the lights will come on. This is the same for turning it off. Many times only 1 turns off so I press off again and then the remaining 3 turn off.

If I use the Hubitat site and control each device just individually, they turn on and off instantly, so that rules out it being a signal or distance issue. It's just when I use the site to turn a scene on and off. It works most times, but half the time only a few lights come on, so you have to press the scene a second time then it works.

Just wondering if there's anything I can do or check to troubleshoot, or if there's any better way to do scenes. Thanks!

Not sure what to do but I see this as well. It mainly happens when I turn on multiple devices at once. Like turning on all house lights at once never works 100% of the time.

I suspect this is also why Alexa reports "I don't know what went wrong" when I turn on/off some lights (they usually work, but sometimes there is a delay on a few).

Would be nice if this issue was fixed. Is hubitat sending too many commands on the mesh at once? Is it not reporting back when something changes state?

I'd suggest to start with reviewing the documentation to see if you have made an error in setup.

https://docs.hubitat.com/index.php?title=Groups_and_Scenes

I've seen this on my friend's hub as well. I don't see how it can be an error in setup--it eventually works if you do it two or three times, but I did review the docs just to make sure there was nothing shocking contained therein. :slight_smile:

I also had some problems when I had bulbs directly paired to a dedicated bulb hub, but I think they always all turned on or off, just not necessarily on to the correct settings. Probably different, but in any case, I might go back to my original setup of using the Hue Bridge. I see some people have been having problems with that lately too, but I never did aside from some "popcorn effect" since I always addressed individual bulbs rather than rooms (never made sense to me; I rarely want everything on to the same setting, especially speciality lights like counter lighting I only want on sometimes) and the integration unfortunately does not support Hue scenes.

Still no luck here so on the fence about returning this. I've read the setup documentation which is super easy but it's not even correct. It says a "Bulb" type is for directly connected bulbs to the Hub, and says use "Dimmer" type for things like Philips Hue. Philips Hue doesn't come up under Dimmer, it only comes up under Bulbs for starters.

Either way it's not restricted to Hue. If I make a scene where it includes Radio RA2 dimmers I have similar issues. You press the scene on and it takes 1-2 seconds before it even does anything, and then turns the lights in the scene on one at a time after each other not at the same time. That's not a huge issue but it's when it keeps some off that drives me nuts. You have 5 dimmers in a scene, turn it on and only 3 lights come on. Press on again and the other 2 come on. Press off and 4 of them go off leaving 1 off. Press off again and the 5th one finally turns off etc.

For the Hue lights I'm just buying a Hue Dimmer to use to control those scenes as well as I've been at this for a week unsuccessfully. Not new to home automation here, been doing this for 6+ years using HomeSeer and SmartThings mostly plus Indigo, ISY994 Insteon Hub, Wink, Home Assistant, Vera, etc so creating scenes isn't a new concept to me, it just doesn't turn all the lights on with Hubitat for some reason or off without doing the action a few times.

Just checked the Groups and Scene docs and I'm not sure why they were written that way. As far as I can tell based on my own devices, "bulbs" shows color-capable lights like Sengled Color bulbs or Hue White and Color bulbs, whether directly paired or used via the Bridge. "Dimmers" shows white-only bulbs or actual dimmers (e.g., in-wall or plugin Z-Wave dimmers; i.e., anything that supports switchLevel but not color), and "Switches" shows anything that supports on/off (i.e., switch, such an in-wall Z-Wave switch or smart outlet), with each omitting devices that support greater capabilities. I don't use Hue Rooms in Hubitat (I'm apparently the only person who doesn't want every single light in a room to come all the time...), but I have to guess that whoever wrote those docs maybe only had Hue White bulbs.

Back to your problem: I've seen this before too. If you haven't tried enabling group messaging yet for directly connected Zigbee bulbs in the Groups app, that could work, but there's nothing like that for scenes (unless your Scene uses the Group). If it is on, disabling it might help, but usually it's the other way around.

For Zigbee bulbs, I'm thinking of moving mine all back to the Hue Bridge--I didn't have any problems when I was using that (besides the occasional "popcorn effect"). I was hoping I'd be able to take advantage of group messaging when directly paired; turns out, it's not much different, and actually worse in some ways. The Bridge may be an option if you have one. It wouldn't explain the issues with LAN devices like your Lutron integrator not having its devices turned off with scenes, however, so unless you have an insanely large number of devices that you're addressing individually and might be overwhelming the hub (a workaround could be to do groups at a time and a slight pause in between), I'm not sure what could be going on. If you haven't reached out to Support directly, you may wish to consider doing so to see if they have any ideas--sounds like the kind of problem they'd be interesting in fixing since it definitely shouldn't happen regardless.

Thanks, for the Zigbee group thing I'm not sure how helpful that is since the Hue lights go through the Hue bridge and so does the Radio RA2 as that goes through the Main Repeater, so nothing is directly connected to Hubitat. I don't mind the popcorn effect that much, it's more when it just doesn't turn a light on that it makes it useless. The odd time I press On with a scene and nothing happens at all so I have to press it a second time. So just not super reliable.

Did you ever find a solution? I just migrated from ST this weekend and am having this issue. Same lights and everything on ST and this was never a problem.

2.2.6 is currently not in Beta as far as I know so it may still be a bit before release, but may help with your issues.

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Please tell me how many and of what type are these devices?

In one of the scenes where this is happening:
3x Sylvania Smart+ LED Strips (RGBW Zigbee)
8x (3 of them in a group) Sylvania Smart+ Bulbs (RGBW Zigbee)
1 x Z-wave outlet
1 x Leviton Z-wave dimmer
1 x Gledopto LED fixture (RGBCCT Zigbee)
1 x virtual button

It seems like it's the Sylvania bulbs and strips that are impacted - I've not yet noticed the other Zigbee light or any of the Z-wave buttons having an issue.

I did start using the Advanced Generic RBGW Zigbee driver for the strips, which fixed a different issue I was having, but not this problem.

Happen to debug further, provide logs, etc.

I forgot about this post as it's almost 2 years old. No I just gave up on it and don't use scenes and instead just use rule machine or button controller and manually specify what I want each light to do instead and that seems to work. I only use the Groups and Scenes app to make a group for each light, so if I ever have to replace one I just replace it in the Group vs having to reprogram everything. Scenes have never worked properly for me, especially with Hue as it never puts them back to the proper colour.

Are the settings for these Zigbee devices all the same? If so, put them in a Group and turn on Zigbee Group Messaging.

Are the settings for these Zigbee devices all the same? If so, put them in a Group and turn on Zigbee Group Messaging.

Unfortunately not. There are some that are (hence the group of three I noted), and actually there are two others that are the same, so I suppose I could reduce the net number of devices run by one by creating another group. Certainly worth a shot, though I suspect I'd still have issues with other scenes that have up to six additional Zigbee devices at play.

We're working on this issue. The problem is that Scene is throwing too many Zigbee commands in fast succession. You might follow what @lmoreau said above as a workaround.

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Yep, I applied what ended up being two groups to the scene, removing a net of two lights from that scene and five from another - we'll see if that helps.

I've never done any driver or Groovy dev (nothing with home automation actually - just web-dev) but was thinking about learning as I immediately wondered about the feasibility of writing an application to 'proxy' the scenes where I could throttle them a bit, but hopefully you guys have a fix before I go from zero to application authoring :slight_smile:

We actually are adding 'metering' to the next release of Group and Scene, although this is hopefully a temporary workaround. It does work though in our testing, without being noticeable.

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Do "core" apps, such as group and scene, ever get released independently or do this always get baked into the same sprints as the firmware releases? Brand new to HE so not in any way rushing, just curious how things work.

Everything is updated in the same release. These days we're running a couple of months between releases. 2.2.6 is coming to beta this week, and for public release in a few weeks.

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