Lighting Problem - Only responds when part of a group with Zigbee group messaging turned on

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1

I am continually having zigbee lights that stop responding. It was recommended that I turn off group messaging because some devices weren't correctly adjusting when turned on, but everything went to crap. I'll focus on my office as a small subset of the overall problem.

The office has all Eaton Halo RL5601 running on the HE Generic Zigbee CT Bulb (dev) driver.

Yesterday, two of the lights would only work as part of a group when Zigbee group messaging is turned on. They would not respond at all from within the UI and there had been nothing added to the specific device event logs for a few days. I suspect this was because the device has dropped off HE, but the group message is still sent and the device subscribes to it, even though there is no longer a handshake between HE and the bulb

To figure out what is going on, I have moved HE to the same room, right in the middle. This room is 13ftx20ft, and there are 8 bulbs. Also, within 5 ft in every direction, I have 3 Iris plugs (hopefully repeating? Heard they are supposed to be good at that, so I bought 8 to try). I then shut off the zigbee antenna for nearly an hour, and turned it back on. I let everything settle for more than an hour and created a new group for the office (I deleted the old group before moving the HE).

After resetting everything, I would expect that I could turn the virtual dimmer created by the group on and off without having any issues. This is far from the case. I sometimes have one bulb that will not turn on or off, and a second press of the UI button for the virtual dimmer will allow the light to react correctly. This is exactly what was happening before I moved the HE to the same room, thinking it was a mesh problem.

For information - and connected to HE (and behaving very poorly as well) - I have another 26 bulbs (all Lightify) in the house, all on the level below my office. I also have the 5 additional iris outlets in the next level down. There is 4 iris motion sensors and 4 Lightify buttons to round out the collection (and the only battery operated devices on the HE).

I tried to start attaching my z-wave stuff, but that was a no-go because I couldn't get them to disconnect from ST.

I'm starting to think that the number of bulbs I'm trying to turn on and off at once is too many, but that just doesn't make sense. Do I have a bad HE or antenna, or am I just missing something?

Thanks for the help. I'm starting to feel desperate
Jon.

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This is exactly the same behavior I have been reporting for a while. I no longer have any smart bulbs on the Hubitat system but I do have a lot of Smart Plugs which frequenty go unresponsive until I reboot the hub or toggle the Zigbee radio. But after doing that, that or another plug will soon go offline.

The fact that you can control them using group messagin (multicast) but not directly in the UI (unicast) likely means that the hub doesn't have a route to the bulb. By using group messaging, routers will pass on the message to all nodes on their neighbors list (with limits). This is why your lights work on group messaging but not individually.

Tagging @chuck.schwer who I've been working with to chase this down on my system.

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@srwhite, Thank you. I have been following your thread, but it seems to have taken a turn in a direction that I didn't want to hijack.

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A couple hours ago, I decided to add all of the downstairs bulbs to a group, since I had removed all of the groups in frustration. There are 22 various Lightify bulbs in a large open kitchen/dining/living room. Spread across the entire room is also 5 additional iris outlets. Tonight, when it was time to go to bed, turning off the virtual switch via the UI of HE only turned about 6 of them off. Another press claimed a couple more. I sat down and was able to individually turn all but one off within the UI of HE, but had to do so individually.

This room is directly below the HE hub, All of the bulbs are within 40 feet in a direct line, albeit through a floor (these are mostly can lights). The 5 iris outlets are each within line of sight, with no obstructions to 90% of the bulbs.

I am increasingly beginning to think that HE cannot handle this many Zigbee devices at once. This setup without the iris outlets was significantly better behaving on SmartThings. With the ability to do group messaging, and the addition of the Iris outlets, HE should completely destroy the SmarThings performance. Instead, I have to continually log into the UI to click lights, and reset them so they reconnect to the HE. This is a PITA considering one one of my switches has 10 bulbs on it, meaning I resort to resetting 10 bulbs, or get on the ladder, pull one out of the ceiling, and reset it at the light.

5

#metoo

I have a group with only 2 bulbs and have the exact same problem as you report here.

I dont think its limited to zigbee, I saw similar stuff with groups of z-wave dimmers.

Ive seen other threads where folks report when sending out multiple messages at once, eg locking multiple locks, is similarly unreliable.

Whats in common here? sending out messages to multiple devices simultaneously? perhaps its tripping over itself, or blocking the ACKs.

Agree 100% that we are all expecting HE to destroy ST. Its not currently. If they dont sort it out soon there may be an exodus.

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Agreed. As I sit here angrily staring at only 1/3 of my kitchen/dining/living room lights on.

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Add me to the list, but on the suspicion of "too many devices to handle". I have an "ALL Lights" group that gets turned off at bedtime. Occasionally it doesn't get them all. I have group messaging turned on, but some of the missed devices are Z-Wave. This has been an ongoing problem with Groups. I haven't done much testing due to the fact it's a rather huge group.

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I would settle for all of my lights turning on when I push the button. I don't know that is too much to ask, yet I don't seem to get any attention on the thread I have created to figure out the issue.

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I would suggest you email support. I always think of forums as 'best effort' support, but no guarantee you will get an official answer. If there is something I DEFINITELY want an answer back on - I email support. they have responded 100% of the time.

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I read your lighting issues.. I only have a few zigbee devices and they are working correctly so cannot help there sorry. Like @JasonJoelOld said I would contact support as @bobbyD and crew are very helpful. I worry though that they are or will be getting overwhelmed by these baseline type issues/anomalies as the user base increases.

For me I am looking at recommending HE to some of my clients but that means I need to be able to support it. As long as I know the back-end is stable I can deal with some of the more esoteric stuff.

To be fair to HE most of my devices are working properly -now that I've reset, rebuilt everything and added a 2nd hub for the upstairs.

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At the risk of waking a dead thread here, I'm having the same problem with a group of 18 Peanut outlets that control dumb lights. Did anyone find a strategy that works reliably'sh?