Hey all, very new to Hubitat, but loving it so far. I’m getting a pretty weird thing happening:
I have some sengled element classic lights connected to dumb switches in my house. When someone toggles the light switch from off to on, the light turns on momentarily and then turns back off. Then if you turn off the switch and turn it back on it comes on and stays on. In other words, this only seems to happen when the switch has been off for a while., a quick off-on doesn’t seem to trigger this behavior.
My hubitat is hardware version REV C7 and platform version 2.2.5.131. I have rules machine running but have no lighting rules at the moment.
The Sengled model according to the devices section of the hubitat is e12-n14
I would suspect this isn't anything to do with your Hubitat hub, more likely to be a feature of the bulbs. I know my old-school sensor light on my driveway behaves like you were describing, allowing me to override the built in motion sensor and have the light stay on.
Hmm, I’ll play around with it some more, but these bulbs don’t have motion sensors to my knowledge and this behavior wasn’t there before I switched from smart things to hubitat. It also seems like they didn’t do this before I allowed the hub to update to a more recent version a few days ago, but I can’t swear by that as the hubitat itself is so new that I could have just missed it.
Hmmm, HE may be back in the mix then, odd.... I guess a couple of things you could try in order to rule it in or out would be to try turning off the HE hub and see if a paired bulb still behaves the same way or not. Similarly, if you can afford to un-pair a bulb or have one that has not been paired with HE, try doing a similar test to see how it behaves.
If it is tied to those bulbs paired and connected to the HE hub, then I'm not sure....
Just tried what you suggested: Turned off the hubitat hub and turned on the lights - turned on and stayed on. But then again, I had used those lights a while ago - will try again in the morning when the family isn’t asleep with some lights that haven’t been used in a while to rule that out.
Look at the settings on the device page for the bulbs...if you're using drivers that have a setting to control power on behavior after power has been removed/restored. For example, the Advanced Zigbee RGBW driver has the following setting:
Check your driver page for the bulb for that Preferences setting. If you don't see a setting like that, then you could switch to the Advanced Zigbee RGBW Bulb driver and set it to "On" and I bet that solves it.
I can confirm that the current driver does not have that option - I was actually looking for that setting as I too thought that might be it (I have inovelli smart switches elsewhere in the house and they have it). Just to confirm before I change the driver, is it going to be a problem that I’m using the driver for a different bulb? My bulbs are white only not rgbw.
Sengled bulbs are meant to be powered 100% of the time and controlled by a hub.
When you turn the bulb off with a dumb switch you are turning off the internal controller and radio. It will loose contact with the Hub during the off period.
If you switch the power off and on quickly you likely don't allow enough time for the internal power supply to deplete the small amount of energy storage it has. i.e. it stays on for some small amount of time (maybe a second or less) even with the power off.
You may want to try the "Sengled Element Classic (Legacy)" driver. Once you change the driver type and click SAVE, be sure to click CONFIGURE. This will send that driver's configuration parameters to the bulb. This "Legacy" driver was re-added to the latest firmware to address issues like you're experiencing with these bulbs.
One of the very cool features of the Sengled bulbs, is that they are designed to be manually turned off via a wall switch. Since they are not Zigbee repeaters, powering them down fully, will not hurt your Zigbee mesh network. They also have a very cool feature where they will send a 'last gasp' Zigbee message when powered off, to tell the hub that they are in fact 'off'. This at least helps the hub to know the correct state of the bulb. Manually powering them back on, will likewise send an 'on' status update to the hub. These are the only Zigbee bulbs that I know of which work in this way.
In general, it is best to always leave the wall switches on when using smart bulbs. However, if that is not feasible for any of a variety of reasons, Sengled bulbs are probably the best solution.
Sorry, missed you had the white bulbs. As @ogiewon says, you can use the driver he indicated.
I've also used the new Advanced Zigbee Bulb driver (the one for White bulbs) with a Sengled bulb I have that was getting turned off and on via a dumb switch, and with Power Restore State set to on it worked perfectly.
I am also having this problem and it only started since 2.2.5.131, worked fine before. clearly the update broke this, but i will try the older driver like suggested here.
I've been seeing this too and like you, it seemed to happen after recent updates. In my case, I only noticed it when re-pairing bulbs after a reset. I looked at it as an improvement because in the event of a power loss they will come on when power is restored then turn off. Personally, I like that. Otherwise, I don't see any reason to operate a smart light by a switch at all... unless maybe when a motion sensor fails to work.
My use-case is family members who are less committed to the smart aspects of smart houses and not having neutrals in the switchbox to be able to install smart switches. This enables me to turn off the lights remotely (and automatically) when the offspring inevitably leave the lights on.
And Inovelli has Black and Red series dimmers that don't require neutrals. The Black series is supposed to be availabel mid-month, Red is already available.
Yep, these I have elsewhere in the house where there are neutrals in the box (the inconsistency of the wiring in this house is killing me). I tried installing these without neutrals in the box and the LED lights flickered when off. I have the bypasses they sent out with them; however, while I'm comfortable enough with swapping out switches, I fear messing something up taking out the lights themselves
You just have to adjust your perspective...you wouldn't be "taking out the lights," you'd be "creating an opportunity to purchase new and improved equipment."
