I bought 4 of these zigbee led strips on sale recently ($22 each), each of which comes with 1 long strip + power supply & zigbee adapter. So far, I tried hooking up one of them temporarily, and was able to pair it to HE, although the connection seems inconsistent, and i've had to unpair and repair to get it working with HE again. And then I learned that these are the bad kind of zigbees that can mess up your existing zigbee mesh.
For someone who is just getting started on this journey with hubitat & zigbee/z-wave/lutron casetas, what would you recommend? A) One option i've heard is getting additional HEs just for Lights, but i'm not sure i want to spend $150 to do that. B) alternatively, I could just return all of these and find different LED products.
Curious if there are any intermediate solutions that can help me use these LED strips in a good way though. for example, can i just get some better adapters (zigbee or others) that would still work with these strips? It's my first time messing around with LED strips in general so i'm pretty clueless on this. Thanks so much.
ive had a set for years along with the garden spots.. never screwed up my smartthings or hubitat mesh.. occasionaly it doesnt turn off or needs to be reset (ie unplug and plug back in) but other than that working ok
If EU you can buy a separate hue hub or Ikea hub. If US you can look into a cheap smartthings (I got one for $25) or use an old laptop with a cheap zigbee stick and home assistant.
I only have one set up so far, but zero issues. Turns on/off immediately w/out problems and has been 100% reliable, hasn't caused any issues w/other Zigbee devices. Sengled are $40/6ft, vs. your $22/16 feet for Sylvania. I'd give the Sylvania a chance. If you're having problems w/them staying connected then it's more likely you may need a Zigbee repeater near it. Mine is as far from the hub as you can get in my house, but I have a repeater (Centralite plug) between the hub and the light strip.
I have 3 Gardenspot versions constantly connected, without real issue (every once in a while they may need to be unplugged/plugged back in to reconnect if I have not used them in months). Plus we have another 3 sets temporarily connected for Halloween decorations (have been running fine for the last 3 weeks).
For the sectional LED strips specifically, we have one that has been inside for a couple years now and is used as a "general status light" that we can see easily (usually to show if a flood sensor is triggered). Another is set up to show if it is ok to bother me while I am working in my office now (if it is red, daddy is on a call, type of idea). No problems with them at all.
We DID have one of the full length LED strip versions as well. It ALSO seemed to work well for some time... until our "troublemaker" cat decided to chew through the connector AND 3 areas of the LED strip, basically killing the whole thing. Maybe someday I will cut and splice it all back together but it is pretty low priority knowing she would just come back and chew it again.
Lucky for her that it wasn't a normal electrical line...we lost (literrally and figuratively) a hamster when I was a kid. We were playing w/it outside the cage when our parents were next door (not supposed to do that!) and he got away from us behind a large bureau. When our parents got home and moved the bureau, there was our Hamsty (cut us some slack, we were kids ) behind the dresser, laid flat out next to a lamp wire he had chewed through, dead as a doornail. Was a while before our parents would let us have another small pet.
I had about 15 sets that worked great on Wink. Had to put them on their own Hubitat hub to get them to work reliability. They’re bulletproof now. Cheaper to get a second hub than to replace all of the units
Thanks for all the responses. Sounds like it's really a YMMV situation in terms of whether these will work or not without messing up the mesh. So I will give this a try and move forward.
Regarding getting a secondary dedicated hub for zigbee LED strips, I have 2 more questions:
When adding a dedicated hub, do people just run 2 hubs independent of each other? Or does this new dedicated hub run as some sort of a child hub to the original HE, so that you can still have all devices ultimately integrated in 1 hub?
What are some cost-effective hubs that would work well for this purpose as a secondary hub exclusively for these zigbee LED strips? Sengled hub doesn't seem to support sylvania according to Q&A on Amazon. There is Sylvania's Lightify gateway for ~$15, but seems to have low reviews, and people warning the cloud support is stopping in 2021 (not entirely sure if that would render this useless for me). $150 for another HE device sounds a little bit wasteful?
you'll need another hubitat hub if you want to dedicate one hub to potentially problematic devices. The community-developed app HubConnect will allow you to use devices across the two hubs pretty seamlessly. The only non-HE hub supported by HubConnect is SmartThings.
FWIW, I have a few of the Sylvania LED strips and they are working just fine for me too. I did update their firmware with a Lightify gateway before pairing with Hubitat though. They're 14 bucks on Amazon (in the US) at the moment:
is there a meaningful firmware update that makes the sylvania strips work better with hubitat?
did you use the lightify hub solely for the purpose of updating firmware, and now you don't use the hub, and just have the strips connect directly to your main HE?
I can't say for sure that it'll help. But it's possible the variable experience that people have with Lightify/Smart+ branded devices could be on the basis of firmware versions. I think @Ken_Fraleigh's experience supports that theory (not necessarily with this specific Lightify/Smart+ device). I got the gateway just to do some firmware updates.
My experience with them is that the Gardenspots I have updated work better than the older ones I have not gotten to yet.
Something I think they also do is change to "white" when coming back from being unplugged (or power failure) whereas the older ones defaulted to purple.
As others had mentioned, I too ordered the Lightify gateway and updated all my lights to the latest FW, for me, that didn't matter, the LED strips would constantly fall off the mesh and would have to be repaired. I have multipe in cove areas on the ceiling and getting a ladder to repair was becoming a PITA!!! Plus the resetting process of 5 times ac cycle 3 seconds in between is MADDENING!!! The engineer who came up with that should be strung and quartered (just being melodramatic here). When I got a 2nd Hubitat dedicated to only the Smart+ strips, and configured HubConnect, my Smart+ lights have been flawless for many months (probably around 6 months or so) I suggest after updating the FW, if you find that even one drops off your hub that you save yourself the time and energy and get a 2nd HE.
I tried one of those as I have miles of extra strips. That controller produces different color and color temp when set to the same value as the Sylvania controller. I have 22 devices and would have been expensive to update each one, the extra HE worked out great.
If you're having problems w/them staying connected then it's more likely you may need a Zigbee repeater near it. Mine is as far from the hub as you can get in my house, but I have a repeater (Centralite plug) between the hub and the light strip.
) behind the dresser, laid flat out next to a lamp wire he had chewed through, dead as a doornail. 
Was a while before our parents would let us have another small pet.
