Can anyone on the HE staff please tell me what Zigbee bulbs they find work best? I now have several Lightify bulbs and based on comments I hear, apparently they are the problem with my Zigbee mesh as they are very poor repeaters. They also seem to drop off the network too often. I don't really care about RGB bulbs, but color temperature bulbs are nice. And I really don't like the high cost of the Hue bulbs.
I suggest to move your current bulbs to a hue bridge, I'm not sure if hue works with your bulbs but when I had ST I had a big mess with my Crees, they are bad repeaters and the presence sensor were false arriving and leaving, I moved bulbs to hue, problem solved. Hue hub is cheap.
The only ones I know for sure that don't cause issues are the ones that do not repeate, that brand being sengled if I recall.
I can verify via packet captures that osram and hue can cause problems.
Sengled I think
Great. Amazon has them at a very decent price - 8 for $61.59. Is the Sengled hub recommended/supported or am I fine with connecting directly to the HE Hub?
I just read you can pair your bulbs to a hue bridge, you can get one for very cheap, and its local.
Dont get their hub, besides there is no integration with it, the bulbs work just fine on HE
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Connect Sengled bulbs directly to the hub. The Sengled Hub cannot be integrated with Hubitat. I have used GE Link, Cree Connected, and Sengled Element Color Plus bulbs. The GE Link bulbs are crap. The Cree bulbs are OK, but not great. The Sengled have been problem free so far.
Cree Connected bulbs work flawlessly as long as you have less than 10. Once you have more than 10 they start dropping messages. But good to have in some areas where the bulbs need to talk to eachother. They repeat ZLL.
Sengleds are reliable, except for the unorthodox setlevel stuff. I have them in closets where the on/off is unlikely to be tampered with.
Having great success with the TRÅDFRI bulbs here from Ikea. Cheap as chips and have been very stable. 13 GU10s, 3 dimmer units and 4 e14s. The only thing I don’t like is sometimes they show as inactive in the UI, but still work fine.
Are there RGB bulbs??
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There are, but only as a kit with a dimmer, which makes them not so cheap an alternative.
https://www.ikea.com/gb/en/products/lighting/smart-lighting/trĂĄdfri-dimming-kit-colour-and-white-spectrum-grey-white-art-70338951/
That is a shame. Really hope RGB bulbs start getting cheaper.
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From what I read, the Hue bulbs cant be used as repeaters for other devices if used with the Hue hub, is that correct?
If instead I use Hue bulbs direct with Hubitat, without a hub, do they have the problem with dropping messages?
I read elsewhere that the TRĂ…DFRI also drop messages when repeating. Is that not the case then?
The nonexistent ideal zigbee bulb:
- Repeats faithfully and never skips a message
- Capable of 16 million colors
- Capable of CT range of 1500K-6500K
- Can receive prestaged color/CT
- setLevel 0 = off. setLevel anything else = on
- Configurable ramp times
- ZLL
Did I miss anything?
- High (20kHz+) PWM frequency — or no PWM at all with constant current drivers
- Ra/CRI 90+
- R9 50+
With the exception of the repeater and zll, and maybe the 1500 ct, which is a device specific limit, all the remainder are limitations within the driver interface, or the driver.
All our built in drivers support color prestaging, set level 0 can be forced in the driver, but most bulbs don't know what to do with it, and it varries by manufacturer.
OK, I ordered 8 Singled bulbs. I had 9 Lightify bulbs. I replaced one with a standard bulb and an extra Iris outlet, the others replaced with the Singled bulbs. Gave it several hours for the mesh to rebuild and then ran the Zigbee log and notice that signal strength is much higher for most of my Zigbee devices, and all of my lost packets with my motion sensors seem to have disappeared.
Anybody want to buy 9 slightly used Lightify bulbs?
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Glad to hear the Sengled bulbs solved your Zigbee mesh issues. Always great to have more feedback for the community. Thanks for posting the update!
Not surprisingly, add GE links to the list of known bad routers, it stole my test zigbee lock in the lab and refused to pass payloads to and fro, just as the hue did a few weeks prior.
At least the links, unlike the osrams can be paired to the hue bridge.
The only thing I don't like about the sengleds is the fact they have no soft start when turned on, and they consider this a feature?
I'm pretty sure I can overcome this in the driver, one of these days...
