Total newb here, but thought I had a handle on everything. Here’s my situation… I have four GE Link Bulbs that I recently purchased that paired incredibly easy with ST and everything was going swimmingly. I set them up with the WackWare device type, and I’ve been driving them in groups via the Dim With Me SmartApp. Again, everything worked perfect.
However, Thursday evening with nothing being changed in my setup they all simultaneously ceased to be controlled by the Virtual Dim with Me switch, or directly via their individual Thing controls. I tried resetting the lights per the sparse GE Link instructions, power cycle until they dim and brighten. Nothing. Decided to sit on it for the night.
Next day, again nothing. So last night I went so far as to remove all of them and their associated SmartApps, move them to a lamp next to the hub and relink all off them. After going through the process everything was back working as it had prior to Thursday’s debacle. Today, a breaker got thrown for our BR circuit for literally seconds prior to it being turned back on and I’m in the same boat with both of the GE Link bulbs in my room not connecting or responding. I went through the reset process as many time as I could psychologically bear to no avail.
What gives? What should I look for in the logs to diagnose the problem. Is this a zigbee problem, the lights are about 25-30 ft upstairs diagonal through the floor from the hub location? Anyone else having a problem like this? The wife will never get on board with this if the promised solution just keeps causing problems.
Anybody else figure how to do this? I have exact same issue. My hub has lost connection with one of the ge link bulbs and I am away from home causing now light to be turned on permanently instead of following the schedule. I am helpless as I am remote.
Anybody know anything we can do remotely with smartthings app to reconnect the GE Link bulb ? It was working fine for a few days…
anecdotally, someone renamed their bulb and re-established their status updates from GE Links.
I have some GE Links but I don’t pay much attention to them. I do occasionally lose control over them but I don’t do anything extraordinary to re-establish.
@langonica and @remgan, have you seen this thread below? A few of us have been polishing up ST’s device type to dim below 10%, as well as option for dim rate and a few other things. Using Pollster along with this device type is also a very good idea.
@remgan, per your question, remotely there’s not much to do unless the bulb gets manually shut off and back on. Since doing what I mention above, and having the right zigbee firmware on my hub, my bulbs have been working flawlessly.
Quite a few of my 13 some odd GE Link bulbs have lost connection to hub. I don’t seem to be having the same issues as others though. My icons (that I’ve changed/customized) are still there but I just cannot control the bulbs from the app. I’m almost positive this is due to them being used manually via the light switch than through smart things.
I have not tried renaming or excluding / including. I really like the bulbs and in the right scenario they do work really well. In a household of people that cannot seem to grasp “do not turn off this switch” they are largely impractical and offer little over a standard led bulb.
I decided to use bulbs over outlets when it comes to lamp control. With outlets, there’s no real way of knowing if the lamp is really on, especially if someone manually turned it off and you didn’t know about it (exception would be energy monitoring outlets). Also, if the outlet was turned off, more than likely my family wouldn’t bother to bend down and press the button to turn it back on, but instead I would be told the lamp stopped working again. Especially if the outlet wasn’t conveniently located.
I wanted something that still felt normal/natural to use, just like any old lamp, but with the ability to control it when needed - like when my kids leave them on. In that scenario, I would programmatically turn them off, but when they came back into the room it was a normal and convenient operation for them to turn the lamp back on. With the updated device type and using the Pollster app, I feel pretty good that when I see a lamp on it’s on. The one thing I wish these bulbs would do it send an off command when manually turned off, but they don’t have any reserve power in a capacitor or small battery to do that.
An update… I switched the device type on all of my GE Link bulbs to the fantastic My GE Link Bulb device type when it dropped, coincidentally around the time I had the initial problems, and began using Pollster as well. Every thing has been working great since. The new device type works great retrieving the status when there are power hiccups, or the wife throws a switch by mistake. I actually believe some of my initial problems had to do with some interference within the 2.4 band that I’ve since mitigated.