New to Hubitat, can't even get all my lights to work right

[NurseWizzle]

So I'm pretty new to this Hubitat thing. I've made a few posts but just trying to get everything set up, starting with the lights.

Basically throughout my entire house I have individual smart bulbs. I think they're all Sengled. Some are color bulbs and some are dimming.

My rooms are: master bedroom, dining room, living room, office. I have more rooms but I'm just starting with this.

In master bedroom I have three bulbs in the ceiling fan fixture that I have grouped as "MB ceiling lights" and a left lamp and right lamp grouped as "MB lamps". I then have a group called "master bedroom lights" consisting of the ceiling and lamp groups. The master bedroom has its own dashboard with "master bedroom lights", "MB ceiling lights", "MB lamps".

The living room is a little more convoluted. Three bulbs in the left ceiling fan (LR Left Ceiling Lights), three bulbs as LR Right Ceiling Lights, two bulbs as "entry lights" and two bulbs as "hall Lights". Those four groups make up "living room lights". Living room has its own dashboard with five tiles.

In both the office and dining room, three bulbs in each, grouped as "office ceiling lights" and "dining room ceiling lights". These are in a dashboard called "whole house". There is also a lighting group called "whole house" which is made up of master bedroom lights, living room lights, dining room lights, office lights.

Now if I go to my master bedroom dashboard, all three tiles work as expected. Same for the five tiles in the living room dashboard. In the whole house dashboard the dining room and office tiles work. But the whole house tile is causing problems. If I click that to turn it off, all of the lights shut off as expected. But when I click that tile again, not all the lights come back on. For instance, both of the master bedroom lamps remain off but the three bulbs in my ceiling fan come on. The dining room remains off as well.

Any ideas where to start here?

[aaiyar]

@NurseWizzle

Any ideas where to start here?

The most likely reason is that you don't have a robust zigbee mesh. Sengled bulbs don't work as zigbee repeaters, so you need other line-powered devices that will do so to create a strong/stable zigbee mesh.

https://docs.hubitat.com/index.php?title=How_to_Build_a_Solid_Zigbee_Mesh

[ogiewon]

@NurseWizzle

Any ideas where to start here?

In addition to @aaiyar’s advice regarding your Zigbee mesh, you might want to make sure that you’ve enabled the “Zigbee Group Messaging” for each of your Hubitat Groups.

If you’ve already tried that, then you may want to not nest groups within groups, to see if that helps. I’d still use the Zigbee Group Messaging feature, as it drastically reduces the amount of Zigbee network traffic to control multiple bulbs.

[bertabcd1234]

@NurseWizzle

I think they're all Sengled

To add to the above, make sure they are Sengled if you think they are--because other Zigbee bulbs might behave differently. As mentioned above, Sengled are not repeaters, which for many Zigbee bulbs is actually a good thing. Most others are, and some (Hue, Cree, GE Link, Osram/ Sylvania--or at least the early generation[s?] of them) are known to be poor repeaters, "eating" messages they're supposed to pass along to other devices and causing problems for your Zigbee mesh in odd ways. The Zigbee tips doc linked to above touches on this.

Some solve this problem by using a separate network for lights. If yours are all Sengled, this shouldn't be a problem (again, they aren't repeaters, so they avoid this particular problem). But if they aren't, that is something I'd consider. My preferred solution for this is a Hue Bridge, though some use a second Hubitat. A Hue Bridge only works with Zigbee Light Link (ZLL) or Zigbee 3.0 bulbs, not Zigbee HA 1.2 bulbs (which a lot of Sengleds and some Osram/Sylvania ones are); Hubitat would work with anything, though my luck wasn't quite as good when I tried this.

[brad5]

Just some food for thought... smart bulbs are my least favorite automation device and I use them only as a last resort. It's just too easy to have someone turn off a physical switch that then disconnects power to your smart bulbs, rendering them dumb. Probably not the issue you're having but I always go smart switch first, and if I must use a smart bulb, I figure out a way to disable the switch - if it's a wall switch I put a safety cover on it. If it's a closet fixture with a pull cord, I cut the cord off. Etc.

[rwclements228]

At one time I had a bunch of Hue bulbs connected using the Hue bridge, not Hubitat. They worked using ZHL rather than ZHA, so I did not have to worry about them being lousy Zigbee repeaters.

I have gradually replaced most of the applications using Hue bulbs with Lutron Caseta dimmers. The only Hue bulbs I have left are in table lamps where a dimable Hue bulb is a far less expensive option than a Caseta dimmer. However, lamps with multiple bulbs are on dimmers.

Although expensive, the Lutron Caseta dimmers are rock solid. They do require the Lutron Caseta Pro bridge to interface with Hubitat.

[Ken_Fraleigh]

@NurseWizzle

Any ideas where to start here?

In addition to what @aaiyar and @ogiewon have suggested, make sure you don’t have “enable on/off optimization” toggled on in the group apps. I only ever use this for z-wave since I don’t think there is any benefit for devices using Zigbee group messaging.