Philips Hue, after years of resisting, as of late last year, finally conceded; you can now set their state following restoration from loss of power to on, off, or last state (I believe); alas, I haven't invested in Philips.
My Sengled, if ON when the power is lost, remembers color and intensity when power is restored (or I'm not leaving power off long enough for it to forget).
However, if OFF when power is lost, regardless how short, when power is restored, it comes on at 100% 2700K.
Is it weird it remembers one but not the other given the lights are most likely to be off during overnight power outages? If it can remember they were on at 1%, why can't it remember they were off?
I assume this is a Sengled design issue, not a Hubitat one, but I wanted to post in case I was missing something obvious to help prevent the lights from coming on full intensity when power is restored (aside from leaving them at 1% all night).
Also (less annoying), if off and you ask for a color (via Alexa), regardless of intensity set previously, it comes on 100%. For example, turn off while 1% blue, then later ask Alexa to set light to green, you get 100% green, not 1%.
Because of Sengleds On after power restore, I have created a virtual switch on my dashboard that turns these back off, which is also voice controlled by Alexa.
I believe the Sengled classic bulb does support the power state but not color bulb. Which version do you have? You can try by pressing the configure button on the driver and see if it's working for you.
I just found it of interest, if they were off at the loss of power, when power is restored, they come on at 100% 2700K, However, if any other setting when power is lost, they'll restore at that setting when power is returned.
So they can remember they were on 1% blue after a power outage, which is practically off as far as ambient light goes, but can't remember they were off (or choose not to and come on 100% 2700K).
The Color bulb: model: E11-N1EA
So when the Sengleds all come on at 100% following a power outage, if they wake you, you ask Alexa to turn them back off?
Is there a way to automate turning them off when power is restored?
I doubt it, Because your hub would have to boot up, and I doubt it would "trigger" an event if the light was already on when the boot up happens.
I haven't tested this, in my head it "may" work. If you have your hub on a UPS to where it stays on when the power is out, you may be able to use a bulb's dimmer value or switch "on" (however this would have to be one you never otherwise would turn on) to trigger the after power outage turning them off.
Yep. I read elsewhere you can toss a normally always off smart bulb into a socket somewhere unseen, one that always powers on after power to the bulb is restored, then, just have a rule that watches for it to come on; if it's ever on, chances are power to the whole house just restored, therefore turn off your other bulbs.
@mareksoon i ran in the same situation and conclusion with my Sengled E11-N1EA. So i simply return them because it's not good when a bulb turn ON after a power failure, useless. The best option is to buy Hank RGB Bulb HKZW-RGB02 for the same price.
Z-Wave Plus http://www.hank-tech.com/product-detail.aspx?id=342&pid=1
They are Z-wave so you will be far away from the Zigbee bulb who are often bad repeater.
Also Hubitat have a built in driver for the Hank : Hank RGBW LED Bulb
And you can configure what you want them to do after a power lost! On, Off, Remember last state.
I have 5 Hank RGB Bulb HKZW-RGB01 and they work great.
EDIT 2 feb 2021, I use them since oct 2019, 1 inside and 4 outside. They work in any temperature, -30 to +30c.
I've just got some Sengled Element Classic bulbs and thought I would get in touch with Sengled asking if there are considering changing the firmware so that it remembers it state prior to a power outage including if it was off. I've just had this reply:
Hello!
Thank you for contacting Sengled Support!
I am not sure if the development team is working on that particular feature, but we have had several customers requesting this feature, and that demand has been expressed to them!
Please let me know if you need anything else!
Have a great day,
Marty Sengled Support
So maybe a bit of hope. The only question then is will any new firmware still work correctly when paired to Hubitat? I know that Hue bulbs loose that ability when paired direct to Hubitat.
I'm working on a foolproof method of knowing if there has been a power outage so that I can use RM to turn off any Sengleds after a power cut.
I can easily detect a longish power outage (anything over 30 seconds) via my Iotawatt device, but when we get outages they are often only for a few seconds, which is enough to switch the Sengleds on at full brightness but not so easy to detect. Even using the specific Sengled driver, when testing I've been able to get the situation where the bulb is on but the driver thinks it's off, so I can't use that reliably.
My plan is to tear down a spare Sengled bulb and connect the DC led driver output to a small electromagnet which then activates a contact sensor. The bits are on the way, but I've no idea how well, if at all, it will work. But if it does, it should be fast and accurate.
When a Sengled element is powered off at the switch it sends an 'off' status (useful) but when powered on at the switch it doesn't seem to send an 'on' status. Why would they not do that ?
Create a rule that run after the Hub restart that refresh the state of your device. I assume your hub had a power outage, that it is not on a UPS that keep it ON during an outage.
Trigger Events: Location Event: systemStart
Actions: Delay 1 minute to let the Hub finish is reboot process
Refresh : Bulb, switch, lock....
Notify MobilePhone: Electricity is back
I'd like to take a stab at offering a few more insights on this topic:
Some readers may not be aware that Hue and other bulb manufacturers default to "ON After Power Outage" for safety reasons. Their assumption is either that your home may have experienced an emergency of some kind (storm event? damaged powerline?) so needs light ASAP without human intervention, or – a far more common scenario – an EMT or other first responder has entered a dark house, where they expect a bulb (screwed into a switch-controlled socket) to immediately turn on when they flip the switch.
As we all know by now, Hue capitulated to customer demand for a "Stay OFF After Power Restored" option along with "Resume Previous State" memory, and baked those things into recent firmware updates. One might imagine those decisions come with a non-zero probability that someone, somewhere, will sue the company when the bulbs fail to behave as "expected". One could further surmise that the FCC had a say in the matter, as well as other certification agencies (UL, CE, etc.).
Regardless, I recall devising a basic rule on my old Vera Plus hub (we called such rules Scenes), later enhanced with the truly marvelous plug-in Reactor, that watched for certain tell-tale markers of a Hue bulb having turned itself on after power was restored.
Seems that the bulb(s) in question – definitely the White ones, and presumably the Color ones as well – always came back on to a very specific level (97% was it?) and color setting (whose RGB value I could glean by looking at its attributes). My rule simply watched for both of those values to be in effect (in a Kitchen bulb, IIRC), as its trigger. The sole action was to immediately turn off all of my Hue bulbs en masse -- because one errant light glaring in an otherwise darkened bedroom at 3am, or anywhere else in our home, is enough to wake us up. The lag time between power coming back on and Vera successfully detecting the bulbs being ON was around 25 seconds, long enough to be a true PITA.
All this was rendered moot with Hue's latest firmware updates, of course. But in case this logic applies to Sengled or other mfrs.' products, I wanted to at least mention it.
I've had great luck with using a Ring Extender 2 to detect a loss of power and return to mains. It has a battery so as long as your HE stays up during the outage (mine is on a UPS) all is good. Obviously if HE goes down and Ring reports a return to mains HE will still be booting and the event will be lost. In my case HE will not go down because it only has to stay on UPS for the 30 seconds it takes the generator to start.
Useful. I assume the Extender doesn’t continue its role as a repeater during battery operation so it would have to be a direct link to the hub for this to work of course.
