Is there a best practice for light group management when using Alexa? 95% of my light automation use is verbally through Alexa. I very very rarely use the dashboard. Is it better for me to manage lights using groups within HE or within Alexa? For instance, our rec room has 7 different light switches and plugs in it. So I have options creating a group called Rec Room Lights, both within HE and within Alexa. When I create that group in both, things get wacky. Sometimes they work and sometimes they don't. How are you guys doing it?
I'm looking forward to hearing about this as well. I have a similar setup and use HE groups extensively. I often get just some of the z-wave switches responding in my HE groups. I've considered moving them all over to Alexa groups if that would help.
Interesting. In my family room I have 3 zigbee jasco dimmers and 1 zwave ceiling fan switch. Alexa recognizes that the zwave switch is specifically for a fan, but when I say "Alexa turn on the lights" she always turns on the fan as well with the lights. So annoying...but that is a post in here for another day. LOL
This is what I do in this situation. First I make a group or scene in HE for the lights I want to control lets say Master Bedroom Group. Then I go to the Amazon echo skill and add the group to the list. Next I go to the Alexa app and make a routine so when Alexa hears “Master Bedroom on” she will turn on the Master Bedroom Group that you have set up in devices. Be sure to make a routine. Alexa seems to “hear” better when you say something she is actually looking to hear.
I don't have any problems with Alexa hearing what I ask for her to do. The problem is that HE seems to somehow loose sending messages to some of the items in my groups. Directly turning the groups on and off without Alexa involved has the same problem.
Thats interesting. That is exactly the problem I have been trying to solve and I have been blaming it on Alexa all this time. I think I will delete my HE groups for now, rebuild them all with Alexa groups and see if it works any better. Any idea why the HE groups are so flakey?
Looking at the logs, I can see the Alexa command come in. I then see commands going out to turn on some of the items in the group, but not all of them. That led me to believe groups aren't working dependably.
As a side-note, when this first started happening, I assumed my HE was overloaded (I have about 90 devices and had about 25 rules as well as some user-apps and over a dozen dashboards). To help relieve what I thought was an overloaded hub, I moved all of the rules to node-red and all of the user interface to Home Assistant. I got rid of all of the rules, all of the dashboards and all of the non-core apps except those connecting to Alexa, HA and NR.
But after over a month of evenings and weekends moving logic and configurations over to these other technologies, nothing seems to have changed. I still have commands going to groups going MIA - usually off commands. The recent addition of device and application load displays show that I have a combined load of less than 1% - so I was probably doing all of that work for nothing.
I've avoided moving off groups because that's a lot more work to do with Alexa and NR. But that's my next step. I'll start with the groups I use the most and have seen problems with most often.
So annoying...but that is a post in here for another day. LOL
