Yeah, it sucks as those dimmers ran me about $30 each and now they are basically paper weights. And don't even get me started on the Tap (of which I have 5 of those sitting in a drawer as well).
What I found to be really good button remotes (as long as you are OK with two buttons) are the Sylvania Smart Dimmer Remotes:
They run about $30 each and you can place them over standard US light switches (not sure about UK/Aus style ones though). The battery life on them is really good and I've not had a single one ever drop off or give me issues. There's also a 4 button version, but I've seen mixed reviews here about them.
Now, even with the dimmer on the Hue bridge, you can still trigger HE automations using it, kinda. If you have the dimmer assigned to a specific group of lights, you can have rules in RM that trigger off the lights coming on/off and changing dimmer levels. Be warned though that there can be ~1 minute delay on when a Hue light turns on to when HE knows about it. You can set the polling to 10 seconds, but that tends to hammer the Hue bridge and you'll be subject to rate limiting. However, if the HE is the only thing hitting the Hue bridge, it may not be that big of a deal. In my case, I have 4 outside systems hitting my Hue bridge so I can't poll more than once per minute.
I too had problems with the Hue dimmers staying connected until I added a couple Samsung plugs. It was bad enough that I had put them back on the Hue bridge. Now they are rock solid on HE. When I connect one, it sometimes will have trouble the first day or two until it establishes itself in the mesh, but after that it’s fine. I will agree then the Sylvania 2 button dimmers are very good, as are the Samsung buttons. I was lucky enough to get the Sylvania on sale for $11 each. BTW, I have 47 Sylvania color bulbs and no issues with dropped messages, but I have a zigbee plug in every room, and have noticed a big difference in reliability between the Samsung and peanut plugs. You get what you pay for in this case.
I think you need to try some repeaters. As @Ken_Fraleigh mentioned as well, the repeaters help tremendously. 3 of my 4 dimmers route through a Samsung plug. Mine are the older models by Centralite I believe. They are fantastic repeaters. The one switch that does not show as routing and I've never had an issue with is in the same room as the hub about 5 feet away. My routing table shows 12 devices routing through the same Samsung plug, 3 of those being the dimmers. It's in the same room as my hub.
I also have recently discovered, since I had to change my Zigbee channel from 20 so I could use my SmartThings hub for echo-speaks, that the Hue dimmers are very picky about what channel the HE is using. They would pair to channel 19 for about 2 minutes, and then stop working. I kept pairing them over and over for hours yesterday and this morning all 5 were offline. I changed the channel to 15 and paired them once, and 6 hours later they are still all connected.
Hi Caz just catching up on your post.
These dinners that I currently have on he ate no.morevthan 5-7 off the hub so should I really have a problem with connections.
Hi Ken I've just checked and my he hubs on channel 20. I do have a smarthings hub running in the house as well but I'm not sure how to check which channel that's on🤔
Hi corerootedxb thanks for that info,I'm not really sure how to setup the group's you spoke about when the dimmers on the hue bridge but sounds interesting. I have 3 hue Dimmers at the moment and liked them when they were on the hue bridge but I found the customizable side of them basic that's why I added them to he.
Could you give me any of your examples of using he on the dimmers even when there on the hue bridge.
It’s likely on 20 as well. You can login to SmartThings through your web browser and click on hubs, then scroll down to zigbee. It will say what channel it is on, which can’t be changed on SmartThings. If it’s on 20, I would change HE to 15 and see how that works.
So, in this instance, I'm tracking the dimmer level of a Hue group that is exposed to HE and is controlled via the Hue Dimmer still attached to Hue. When the dimmer level of the lights change, it changes the dimmer level of a light directly attached to HE.
Like I said above, it can take up to a minute for HE to know that the dimmer level changed due to polling. You CAN set that to be faster (down to 10 seconds), but it's not advisable as you could be subject to rate limiting on the Hue bridge.
