Can no longer pair Ikea bulbs (and others)

Devices & Integrations
1

I have a V2 hub and had no problems until we had a power cut of a few hours. Once power resumed, all my Ikea bulbs have gone offline.

I’ve tried rebooting the hub and none have come back. I’ve left them on for days to see if they’d somehow reconnect, but nothing.

So, I resorted to trying to add device for Ikea bulbs. Walking through the process, I get to the point where it tells me to power the bulbs off and on 6 times, to start them pairing, and they bulbs should acknowledge this state with some flashing, which they do, but that stage in the pairing never advances and eventually the bulbs time out and revert back to static brightness.

I’ve tried this with the Ikea GU10 (TRADFRI bulb GU10 WS 400lm) and Ikea E27 (TRADFRI bulb E27 W opal 1000lm), both the existing in-place ones and brand new out the box. Same result for all… the bulb pulses and waits, the app never advances and eventually times out saying ‘There was a problem connecting to the device. Try again.’ Err code: 34-302

I see all of these were reporting a ZigBee route that has a middle hop of ‘↔ Unknown Route (???) ↔’, which may be one of my battery powered zigbee thermometers, that died during that long power outage.

Edit: I’ve just noticed that a few of my old Belkin Wemo bulbs are also offline, so tried to pair them just using the App to Scan for devices, while the bulbs were blinking. Nothing. The Scan process times out with nothing found, again.

Edit2: I noticed my Ikea ZigBee motion sensors were also now offline, so tried to pair those the normal way. The device goes into pairing mode and red led slowly blinks, but the pairing process never detects them.

I’m at a loss for ideas and even more perplexed that a long power outage has caused such disruption of a previously stable environment, and more so now that it seems I can no longer re-pair or even add devices.

2

Perhaps but Unknown Route also shows up for any devices paired to your hub using Edge drivers (directly connected devices that are a repeater and shows Placeholder as device type in IDE).

Do any zigbee devices work? If some zigbee devices do work, I imagine you are experiencing a zigbee mesh issue. When you rebooted - did you reboot through IDE or power cycle by unplugging the power cord (I assume you removed the batteries also if you use the batteries)? If you login to https://account.smartthings.com do the devices show as offline (I expect they would show as Offline there but just checking to rule out an app issue).

My advice would be to power off all Offline zigbee device and all bulbs. Then power cycle the hub by removing the power cord, remove the batteries, wait 20 minutes, put the batteries back in, put the power cord back in. Clear app cache if using Android. Check that your known working devices that you did not power off show as online in the app. Next go to each non-working device that you powered off (at this point, skip any device you had reset and all bulbs - save those for last), power it on, check the app to see if it appears as online. Repeat for every non-working device. If everything is working at this point, proceed to the devices you reset (do devices that are not bulbs first). Power these devices up one at a time, check the app to see if they appear but I doubt they would. If not, try adding.

If you still encounter problems, contact ST support in the ST app > Menu > Contact us > use the send logs option (don’t reboot your hub in order they can get all the needed logs)

I am sure others will offer better advice.

Funny thing - I had a 3 hour power outage yesterday. Some of my zigbee devices showed as Offline. I powered off the devices that were main powered or activated contact and motion sensors and they all returned to Online status. I do not have any zigbee bulbs on my hub though which I believe are the cause of your mesh issues. I would suggest holding off on resetting devices in the future until you repair the mesh first. :slight_smile:

3

Yes. It appears some bulbs that would have continued normally, so you may be right that somehow the zigbee mesh has been disrupted.

Yes, I initially gave the whole environment a few days to see if it would self-heal, but it didn’t. Power cycling the hub was through removal of the power cable (there are no batteries installed).
The online dashboard shows those devices as OFFLINE.

It appears this devices that dropped off are not returning on their own and this re-pairing is a real hit and miss with only 1 bulb out of 6, so far actually being found. It looks like something has changed on the Android app or the hub that has also made pairing far less reliable.

Looks like my only option now, thanks. :thinking: