I've had several of these bulbs over the past few years and have had 4 bulbs stop working -- they flicker, some colors just stop working, or they won't go above a certain brightness. I will say that their support has been pretty great and anytime I have an issue I reach out and they send me a replacement. Does anyone else have similar experiences with these bulbs?
I have seen many similar posts regarding the Sylvania/Osram bulbs. In addition, I have seen posts where users describe Zigbee HA1.2 mesh network instabilities caused by these bulbs (as well as GE Link and Cree bulbs.)
I personally only use Sengled bulbs if they are to be directly paired to my Hubitat hub. Sengled bulbs are inexpensive, reliable, and are designed to NOT be zigbee repeaters. Therefore, they will not try to act as a zigbee repeater, and thus will not negatively impact your zigbee network, even if they are switched off.
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What kinds of issues could they cause? I haven't noticed any issues but also I don't know what to look out for. I have roughly 25 zigbee devices all together if that makes any difference.
Things like delays in the Hubitat hub getting notified by a device that its status has changed. Or, possibly, status updates never making it to the hub (i.e. packets getting dropped.)
If the device updates are not reliable and quick, then any automations that you've created that depend on those devices will also not be reliable or quick.
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Makes sense. I have a lot of Sylvania/Osram devices and never had issues except for these RGBW devices. I have noticed that my front porch light has not been turning off even though my automation says it should have.
My osram gardenspots destroy zigbee meshes. When I had them on zigbee2mqtt, and could watch the zigbee traffic at a low level, as soon as more than about 2 devices started routing through them all traffic would die. Reboot the osrams, data starts flowing again until something decided to route through them again...
So now I have them on their own hub and own zigbee mesh.
Now, to complicate things, Sylvania/osram used various different zigbee chips in the same product line and same product #. Basically making it impossible to know if you are buying a "good one" or a "bad one".
If your mesh is stable, e.g. devices aren't ceasing to respond/dropping off the network, then I wouldn't worry about it. But watch out for that behavior, as on the affected devices it is 100% traffic volume related. So it may be fine now, and if things change routes it could pop up later.
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Yes, this is exactly the type of bad behavior caused by the 'bad' bulbs on a Zigbee HA 1.2 mesh network.
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I hadn't noticed any issues when the devices were on Wink. You all have me convinced, I had just placed another order for more bulbs but will cancel and try some Sengled. The nice thing was that the Sylvania bulbs are half the price (11-14 bucks on Amazon) oh well.
I have no direct evidence for this, and I hope @JasonJoel and @ogiewon will correct me if this is conceptually incorrect. When I got my original Wink hub (back in 2014), I was told it supported a total of 32 zigbee devices per hub. My suspicion since then is that Wink treats all zigbee devices paired to it as end-devices, and doesn't use any of them as zigbee routers.
The other reason I suspect this is that my LeakSmart zigbee water valve would fall off my Wink hub every other day and have to paired to it again. That has never happened with Hubitat. And I have approximately the same number of potential zigbee routers between the water valve and the hub in both situations.
Edit: I also used to have a bunch of Quirky Trippers (also zha 1.2 end devices). The only ones that stayed connected were in direct line of sight of the Wink hub. But the ones in rooms that had plenty of Link and Osram LIghtify bulbs would fall off (even though the bulbs didn't fall off).
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This makes sense to me. Is there any way to make a few select items end-devices in Hubitat? I have a total of 20 CE zigbee downlights so repeating is not a big deal.
I don't believe any Hub can instruct a Zigbee repeater-capable device to not repeat. That would most likely require a firmware change to that particular device.
What are "CE zigbee downlights" ? Are these more Sylvania lights?
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Sorry CE - Commercial Electric recessed downlights.
Ahhh, like these?
Not sure I have seen anyone report whether or not those are on the 'naughty' or 'nice' Zigbee repeater list of devices... 
Yes, just the 6" version. When we had our house remodeled we had then installed. Haven't noticed any issues with them so far.
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@TemptingTime - I have a suggestion for you.
If you already have a large number of zigbee bulbs that route, it will be more cost-effective to put all your bulbs on a separate Hubitat by themselves. For whatever reason, bulbs seem to have no issue routing for each other. They have an issue routing for other devices. It has also been recommended to put all bulbs on a Hue bridge, which one can pickup for less than $30 on eBay. However, some of your bulbs (the Osrams) are ZHA only, and will not pair to the Hue bridge.
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@aaiyar Outside of the 20 downlights I have 7 other bulbs/lights and they are all Osram - 5 bulbs and 2 led strips. I know Sylvania has their own gateway, so would that be another route?
Yes, however, please note Osram/Sylvania sold their smart lighting division to LEDVANCE a few years ago. Osram/Sylvania announced earlier this year that the servers for their cloud-dependent gateway would be shutoff on August 31st. 2021..
With that being said, community member @adamkempenich has developed (and continues to develop) a local Hubitat integration for the Osram/Sylvania Lightify gateway. If you have all your Osram bulbs paired to the Lightify gateway, you can use Adam's integration to bring them into Hubitat right now. Indeed, all bulbs paired before August 31st, 2021 will work fine with Hubitat - thanks to Adam!
I don't know if Adam has reverse engineered the pairing process for new bulbs, yet. So I would recommend steering your future bulb purchases away from Lightify products.
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I haven’t gotten that far, yet. I’ve been deep in an intensive non-HE project the last couple of months. 
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@aaiyar Thanks for the info. Their gateway is super cheap too, you can get a bulb and the gateway for $8 on Amazon.
But just to make sure I'm clear, your recommendation is to leave the CE downlights directly on Hubitat but move all Sylvania bulbs to their own hub?
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Yes. And if you have issues with the CE downlights, then put them on the gateway as well.
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