so these are two lightify bulbs both connected to a light fixture controlled by a switch where the switch is in the always on position. often after period of not using the room like at night one of the two bulbs will stop responding to on and off commands sent thru any app.
it will stay that way till i flip the physical switch off/on then for a while both bulbs will respond fine till the next time it happens.
there does not seem to be a pattern in which one of the bulbs becomes unresponsive and its never both bulbs at the same time. its randomly one or the other.
I had two Cree bedside bulbs with the same behavior, Both were behind the same always-on switch. A poll/refresh every couple of hours seemed to keep them responding well. I wondered, if I had an Xbee, would I be able to see them taking turns being bad repeaters for one another. I finally broke down and went with a smart switch/dumb bulbs combo.
these used to work just fine on ST and the i use these bulbs to change level and color temperature of the lights throughout the day. so unfortunately not an option for me to move to dumb bulbs :-/
its been about 24 hours and its working like a charm. lights turn on, off and dim every single time through rooms manager with rules for that room. color temperature and levels are changing consistently throughout the day with no skipped or staying on even after the command was sent to turn one or both of them off.
there are few other places in the house where light fixtures controlled by a single switch have two lightify bulbs. time to break up those pairs and swap one of them out with a sengled element.
so your theory definitely looking good here … thank you for postulating.
Hey, that's great! I hope there are no more issues. If one does eventually drop, and you are in a testing mood, could you replace the remaining Lightify to see if it is the weak link?
well i have at least 3 other places where there are 2 lightify bulbs in the same light fixture … though these are all on ST. i am going to replace one from each of those pairs with a sengled element bulb, at that point if none of these have an issue like they all do now to varying degree … that would pretty much confirm this is the weak link … no?
My thought process was that if the Sengled has issues then that would still leave the remaining Lightify as a suspect. With two Sengleds in the fixture, that would almost completely rule out my repeater theory. Bottom line, if you don't have any more issues, you have found your solution. I hope that's the case. Thanks for the quote too. I thought I was having issues with a Lightify RGBW routing traffic for me, now I'm convinced.
i actually already have another fixture on HE with all sengled bulbs which doesnt have these issues. now thanks to your help it seems like this is because the sengleds dont act as repeaters thus entirely avoiding this issue.
Based on my undrestanding from the issue, if a device route its packet through those bad repeater, it will have issue becasue of the bad repeater has overflow issue. I think this particular issue cannot be generalized that all zigbee mesh which contain the bad repeater will have the same experience. This only happen if any devices route packets through the bad repeater.
I also have intermittent issues with poorly responsive lightify bulbs. I have one circuit with four bulbs, and another with two. I notice the (temporary) unresponsiveness with bulbs on both circuits.
Unfortunately only lightify makes a smart bulb in a mr16 form factor, so I’m pretty much stuck with them.
I thought that the unresponsiveness might have to do with routing issues, and this thread is making me think that even more.
I’m considering disconnecting all but one bulb and doing a zigbee mesh heal, then rotating which bulb is connected and repeating the heal. My goal would be to ensure that no bulb is relying on another bulb as a repeater. Then one last heal with all the bulbs disconnected so that no other zigbee devices are trying to route through one of the bulbs.
Seems a little convoluted, and I’m not sure it will work out since I believe the mesh heal can take hours to finish after the hub is unplugged for the initial 15 minutes. It may not be practical to leave several of these bulbs disconnected for hours at a time.
from my experimentation having more than one lightify bulb in a fixture seems to cause these issues and seems to come back whenever mesh rebuild happens with all devices connected.
