"Keeping Zigbee bulbs off of HE is a good plan"? This is a rather sad commentary on Hubitat isn't it? Is not controlling zigbee bulbs one of its core missions?
Keeping zigbee bulbs on a separate mesh due to bulbs being bad routers is a good idea. No reflection on Hubitat. Can't fix bad bulb routers.
However you can buy a second hub and put your bulbs on it and link 2 hubs together.
I see. So the problem with my bulbs that fall off the network are not THAT bulb, but the route to that bulb from the next upstream bulb? That sort of makes sense.
I think most of my zigbee bulb woes are from a single cree bulb in hallway as a repeater to two other rooms. I've just freed up an iris smart plug. If I throw it in near the single bulb in the hallway, will the zigbee mesh adjust to prefer a route through that device?
This is by no means specific to any hub. Mix certain Zigbee bulbs and other Zigbee devices on ST, Wink, etc and you can have the same issues.
Zigbee doesn't really allow you to pick which device will route through which router. Bulbs are bad routers for numerous reasons. It's really too bad that they don't just stop routing if in zha mode.
Adding repeaters isn't guaranteeing the route isn't still going to go through a bulb.
Bulbs were meant to be on dedicated bulb type meshes ala zll design spec. Just because it falls back to zha and joins a zha mesh doesn't make it a good idea.
If you have a large enough bulb count, creating it's own mesh is worthwhile in the long run. Especially if you have other zigbee devices you want to work reliably.
Zll bulbs on a zha mesh will work most of the time. But as device count increases and bulbs start filling up their extremely limited router memory space, things start going sideways.
So it isn't really a bulb issue, it's a Zigbee issue. The protocol does not discriminate which messages get sent to which routers, and as a result it's sending ZHA messages to ZLL bulbs. Wouldn't it be better to simply modify the Zigbee protocol to forbid it to route ZHA through ZLL bulbs? Could this be even be done within the hub firmware?
If it were only that simple... You can't just modify a standard... The bulbs are the problem, the zigbee standard auto heals its mesh over time, so you can't just mark a device as a non-router. If it advertises as a router, the mesh and peers will attempt to use it.
It is a bulb issue, if the bulb is a bad router because it was never designed to handle ZHA full packet routing and was only designed to relay bulb data, then its a bulb issue.
Putting bulbs on a bulb only mesh, either ZLL or ZHA solves the issue since the routes are simple and the data is also simple.
It should be "simple" for the bulb manufacturers to actually make bulbs that should act as proper routers... Yet here we are.
I have indeed moved my ZLL bulbs to my Hue Bridge, so everything's gravy. Are there designations in the Zigbee protocol for different router-types? Meaning, is it even possible for a ZLL bulb to advertise itself as a ZLL-only router?
Not to my knowledge, no. The ZLL spec requires the device to fall back to ZHA, but to get Zigbee certified they only need to test the ZLL spec. So it was a gap in the certification process, IMO. There are some good bulbs out there, but the cheap ones, like cree and ge link, etc. are notoriously bad ZHA routers.
I see, thanks. Wish there was a simpler way around it, because this sort of thing really turns people off to home automation in general. You can see it in action in the Amazon reviews.
I dunno man. All of these zigbee bulbs while not flawless, worked better under SmartThings. I'm sick to death of coming home and finding one basement light has been on all day, or one bulb in the garage was stuck on all night.
I went ahead and bought a hue hub just now, but I'm not convinced that its a problem. I REPEATEDLY find both z-wave and zigbee devices have the wrong state in the hubitat app. Hubitat thinks they're off when they're still on. This happens so much that I had to create a little rule machine thing to refresh every n seconds.
That and the damn life360 thing is still frequently broken. I just came home only to discover that they house never went to away mode. AGAIN.
I'm kind of getting the vibe from hubitat that you get from people who are over-matched by the amount of tech debt they're facing- they always have an excuse.
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Garage bulbs are tricky. Garages are usually air tight, fire proof with cemented walls, and that makes it very hard to get signals in and out. My garage bulb has great difficulty. I ended up putting a plug-in repeater in the garage to help, but it's still a little slow, and unfortunately it will still occasionally miss a signal. So that may be one of your problems.
For the basement, it might be a range issue. Z̶i̶g̶b̶e̶e̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶c̶a̶p̶a̶b̶l̶e̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶u̶p̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶4̶ ̶h̶o̶p̶s̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶g̶e̶t̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶h̶u̶b̶.̶
Thirdly, as stated above, it's highly likely a zha/zll mismatch, and a Hue bridge would help with those faulty bulbs.
Z-Wave routing is limited to four hops. Zigbee is not; in commercial installations with thousands of nodes it could be 20 hops or more, I don't know about Hubitat but I recall reading that the SmartThings zigbee stack supports 15 hops to and from the controller.
Argh, sorry about that. I even verified before I posted but I read it wrong. 
Has anyone got a hold of the Zigbee 3.0 certified bulbs yet? I was looking through the Zigbee certification database https://www.zigbee.org/zigbee-products-2/#zigbeecertifiedproducts/?view_30_filters=%5B%7B%22field%22%3A%22field_41%22%2C%22operator%22%3A%22is%22%2C%22value%22%3A%2257295d4703f18db6346a6127%22%7D%5D&view_30_page=1 and Philips, Ikea, and Ledvance (Osram/Sylvania) all have new bulbs that got tested to the Zigbee 3.0 standard. The Ikea outlet which is reported to work well on ZHA networks is also a Zigbee 3.0 product
well whatever. Just tried my third hue hub and its bricked like the first two. Powers on, says it needs an update from the ios app, then never comes back online.
You know what cracks me up? The phrase Software "Engineer"
Hhahahahahahhahahahahahahhaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahahahahahhahhahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
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Don't use IOS 
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Hey, I am one of those...engineering degree and all!
The problem is, the people that work on most apps IMHO are not software engineers.
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Heh. So am I denise. I used to be so proud, but 30 years in I'm ashamed to use the term "engineer" anymore. There's little engineering in software. It's more like you're whittling a solution than engineering it.
This is no one person's fault. Software is eating the world, but the result is not utopia, it's that everything is broken all the time.
Sometimes I think back to the Kafka I read in college and think, "What a pussy!" Dude couldn't even deal with a few paper pushing bureaucrats. The singularity isn't going to exterminate us all Terminator style, or even via the paperclip maximizer. It is simply going to set us on a series of pointless tasks forever. Life as endless phone menu.
What is your mother's maiden name? What city were you born in? What is your first grade teacher's name?
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