Hue Bridge - Import bulbs or just groups?

Not a problem just a query regarding use of the Hue integration. Most of my rooms that I'm planning to migrate to Hue consist of multiple ceiling down-lights. So for my Landing area there are 6 bulbs. I ran discovery in the Hue Bridge integration and brought cross the bulbs into Hubitat as well as the group. Is there any reason to bring across the individual bulbs into Hubitat devices or should I delete them leaving just groups/scenes from Hue?

No reason to use the individual bulbs if you never need them. Groups and scenes are better because they minimize the amount of traffic from Hubitat to the Hue Bridge and from the Hue Bridge to your Hue Zigbee network, all of which are important given that the Hue Bridge has some rate-limiting (not documented exactly how much, though there are old recommendations floating around...) and that Zigbee generally does better with the latter, as reliable as Hue may be despite that.

EDIT: That being said, leaving the devices on the hub would have very little impact (just event parsing based on data from the bridge) if you leave them but don't actually use them, so I wouldn't worry about that alone.

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Thanks @bertabcd1234 and apologies for another best practice query I've just thought of....:

In my first RL instance I've set it up to turn on the imported group when activated and applied different levels & CT's to the group in the RL table for each mode. Would it be better to set those up as scenes in the Hue app and have Room Lighting turn on the scene when activated (then turn off the group when motion inactive)?

If it's only one group, I don't see much in the way of reasons to prefer a scene. A scene would be advantageous if you were using multiple groups or lights since, similar to the above, that would reduce the same kind of traffic and be more favorable for reliability.

One reason to prefer a Hue scene is that the lights will immediately turn on to the scene settings when activated, rather than a brief but often visible transition from their "old" to "new" states as commands over the API do -- but most of the time I don't personally care about that difference. :slight_smile: (People who do things like turn them on at 1% to a specific color in the middle of the night might; I do that, too, and I still don't...)

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Perfect. You've answered the other question I had there, as the bathroom will be coming on during the night at a very low level/different colour.

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I only have 11 Hue bulbs but I bring them in individually from the Hue hub. Even though some of them are functionally in groups I let Hubitat handle setting color temps and levels through various automations in room lighting and rule machine. I've never noticed any sort of delays.

Delays are not the issue so much as HTTP 429 ("too many requests") errors from the Bridge, which are seemingly more common with the V2 than V1 Hue API despite the intention of the commands ultimately being the same. Future versions of the built-in Hue Bridge integration will use V2 for commands if available for most commands (right now, it's really only used in the other direction if available, i.e., for parsing event data), and Philips says they eventually plan to get rid of V1, that being the motivation for this change in the integration.

If you are changing a lot of devices at one time, I would recommend a group (or few) containing those devices or a scene that does the same. Less traffic is always better, especially on Zigbee but even over HTTP to the Hue Bridge given the above.

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@bertabcd1234 is right on the money, but I'll add one more thing to consider. I used to use CT commands from Hubitat to Hue and there is a very tiny flash of the older color. I agree with Robert that it did not really bother me nor my family.

With the above said, I did end up moving everything to scene based in Hubitat for a simple reason. Whenever someone wants manual control, we use the Hue app to set the lighting. By having Hubitat activate scenes rather than sending commands, both systems act the same. I can leverage the automation features in Hubitat, but allow the messaging and color of the Hue Bridge fully come out. If you plan on using color for any reason, I strongly recommend using scenes to avoid small color conversions issues that sometimes pop up.

Finally, depending on your eventual needs, you might look at Hue's Smart Scenes and just have Hubitat turn that on and off. It works really well if you can manage some of Hue's annoying limitations around them.

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