I am having a terrible time trying to get on the hubitat hub from SmartThings. I have mostly zigbee light bulbs (GE Link, Cree, Osram, and some Hue directly connected to hubitata) and they seem to be constantly falling off the network.
There are times where the rules I have set up in rule machine can control things and sometimes where some devices never seem to get the command. Sometimes even when the rules can't control a device, I still can manually.
I've tried resetting lights and rejoining them and they seem to fall back off the network after only minutes.
Is there a way to "heal" the mesh or at least find out why things aren't working? Any help would be appreciated.
you may have to change your zigbee channel and mabe channel your 2.4 wifi channel away from the zigbee channel you choose.
I found zigbee channel 20 to work the best for my devices and I think I moved my wifi to channel 1.
You may also need router devices to extend you network.
Thanks, I just tried changing the zigbee channel. I'll wait for that to propogate and see how it goes. As far as extending my router devices, I assume you're talking about wifi? I have an Eero system with complete coverage. If you're talking about the zigbee network, since all my devices are bulbs, I thought they were all repeaters already.
for Wifi I was talking about changing it's channel as well to something like channell 1 to move away from the zigbee channel.
I was not talking about the wifi range.
The bulbs and any router or device for that matter could potentially not have a strong signal to the hub.
But try your zigbee channel and wifi channel first.
This might be your problem. I don’t have in depth knowledge about this, but from what I’ve read, most zigbee bulbs are pretty bad repeaters. At least they are when they’re on the ZHA profile (like connected directly to a hubitat hub) rather than the ZLL profile (like when connected to a hue bridge).
So the inconsistency you’re seeing might be explained by bulbs not doing a very good job of propagating zigbee signals.
Unfortunately Eero does not allow that level of control. Channels are set automatically and cannot be changed...yet. Hopefully they add this ability sometime in the future.
Are you still running your smartthings hub? And how far is it physically located from the hubitat hub? The zigbee between the two may be interfering with each other.
Also, if you've only moved over some of your devices, then you may be missing a critical repeater, so that's just something to sort a walk-through in your head that each bulb has a likely path back to the hub.
Finally, with Zigbee it's easy to force a network heal. Just take the hub off power for about 20 minutes while leaving all of the other zigbee devices on power. Once they realize the hub is missing, they will go into "panic mode" and when it comes back everybody will rebuild their neighbor tables for the most efficient pattern. This can take a while, so you may not see results until the next day.
Thanks for the reply. I am off the SmartThings hub and they are a decent ways away from each other. Separate rooms. I did the channel change that was recommended above and reset all the devices while searching for devices to get everything back on. It seems to be working pretty good most of the time now, which is better than what it was before.
I'll remember that about the heal. I should have guessed that though, it's the same thing I did with SmartThings.
I have added a few of these around the house to enhance both my Zigbee and Z-Wave mesh strength. It takes a little bit of work to get the built-in Z-Wave repeater paired with Hubitat. Can't remember where I found the magic button press sequence to get it into Z-wave pairing mode. It pairs very quickly for zigbee (control and repeater) though.
So after changing the zigbee channel and rediscovering my devices, things seem ...ok. Most devices have stayed on the network and I've been rejoining the ones that need it in hopes that everything will get sorted out. I am still having a problem of rules not firing as they should.
For example, I have a good morning routine that is set to either run when I press a virtual switch or when the time is between 5:00 and 5:01 am. The rule will fire and some lights will turn on, but some won't. If I fire the rule again, some more lights will turn on that didn't before but maybe not all. Hitting the rule a third time might hit the rest of the devices.
So I know the devices are on the network because the rule can eventually trigger them and I can even go to the device in the web console and control them directly.
Just take the hub off power for about 20 minutes while leaving all of the other zigbee devices on power. Once they realize the hub is missing, they will go into "panic mode" and when it comes back everybody will rebuild their neighbor tables for the most efficient pattern. This can take a while, so you may not see results until the next day.
