Latest firmware. On 1.x firmware never had lights fail to work, now I’m plagued with unreliability.
Last week I replaced 12 Ge zig bee bulbs with Sengled element color bulbs.i removed all the ge bulbs, ( remove in App) and paired the sengled bulbs. The.added back in 6 Ge bulbs. Now even the 6 ge bulbs that I left in ( never removed ) are hit and miss, the sengled bulbs are hit or miss and often not off in the morning ( some will some won’t ) prior to 2.x firmware my Ge bulbs were 99.999% reliable. Now the WAF is low. What can I check or do to get back reliable again.
I'm first going to say, I'm not a Zigbee guy... but I've noticed a pattern or two with Zigbee conversations here in the Community.
Did you rewind to 1.x firmware? I would be surprised if it helped because this looks more Mesh than hub, to me.
Look at Logs, or Device Events. Do they show that the commands were sent? If yes, the Hub's doing it's portion and the bulb isn't receiving well... yet. 18 devices got altered. The Zigbee mesh may still be recovering. You can certainly take an aggressive approach and power down the hub for 15 mins. All of your Zigbee devices will begin to "panic" without a Controller. They will begin a mesh rebuild when you turn the hub back on. It's the same process as changing the Zigbee channel
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The Sengled bulbs are reported to not be repeaters ("routers" in ZigBee terminology), which most smart bulbs, likely the GE ones too, are. Repeaters, if you are not familiar, include most powered devices--e.g., smart outlets or switches and most devices that aren't battery powered (but, of course, ZigBee repeats only for ZigBee, so your Z-Wave devices if you have any don't count here). Smart bulbs are a little odd because, being powered devices, they are generally repeaters, but many/most are reported to be bad repeaters for non-bulbs. (I'm not sure about any specific reputation for the GE bulbs in question.)
In any case, old GE setup probably had lots of bulbs that could act as repeaters, creating a strong mesh, at least for the bulbs; the new Sengled setup could just be behaving this way because of communication problems due to a weaker mesh. You just might need more strategically placed repeaters now. If you have more than 32 ZigBee devices total, you'll also need repeaters since that's the limit for direct connection to the hub (devices routing through repeaters don't count against the hub limit, though each repeater has its own limit as well). If you do think you have good routers available for the bulbs, the advice above may help your new devices find routes through the mesh (assuming the hub is actually sending the appropriate commands, so the log/event-checking advice is good too).
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