GE Link Bulbs no more useful than standard LED's?

I have problems with hello, home commands and the GE bulbs. If there’s 4-5 lights on the hello, home is bound to not turn one of them off. And the app won’t poll to tell me the light didn’t turn off either just says off. My concern is when my home automatically goes into away mode cause of the presence sensors if the lights are all actually off.

I don’t want to install Zwave switches either just cause I’m moving in 6 mo so that’s just unnecessary waste of time and effort. They work perfectly on an individual basis using the app, harmony and even ivee so I definitly think its a group or multiple off command problem on the side of smartthings.

I’ve currently got 16 link bulbs, maybe like 2-3 regular ones, went crazy with the Black Friday $7.50 deal for the link bulbs… Lol

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my house is old and the wiring won’t work for switches so I have some link bulbs. I find they work fine when it’s one light being used but as more lights are used on one action one light often misses the “off” call.

one way around people flipping the switch that i’ve used is hooking it up to a motion sensor. i’ve gotten to the point where when I enter a room and the lights don’t come on i’m all WTF?! :slight_smile:

during the day and evening I have all 3 overhead bathroom lights come on at 100%. when it’s bedtime I have only one light come on at %20 dim like a night light and it’s worked nicely so far.

I’m having the same issues with grouping. Even when I tie it to a motion event. usually one bulb doesn’t turn on or off. I’ve found more success with having one bulb tied to the motion detector and the rest fire using the big switch app. it’s not 100% better, but it is more consistent than all tied to the motion either individually or as a fixture.

that’s an idea i haven’t tried. At first I had 1 virtual dimmer controlling the others and had issues so I switched to addressing the bulbs individually and that still had problems.

The use of 2 GE Link bulbs (connected to SmartThings via a Hue Bridge, just FYI) has been a perfect solution for my particular situation:

Two lights, one at top of staircase the other at bottom, were connected to 2 three way non-dimming switches with no neutral.

Now I leave the circuit on and use SmartThings to turn on either or both lights at desired dim levels, etc., and velcroed (3M) Aeotec Aeon Minimotes at top and bottom of stairs.

The #1 button is simply on/off toggle of both lights, and the other buttons for individual lights of the stairs and other nearby lighting devices (some ZigBee, some Z-Wave, all SmartThings).

At $15, these GE Links are miraculous, and I can always move them to lamps if I upgrade to circuit wall switches… But, remember, that would not give me the granularity of controlling my two staircase lights both individually and paired.

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New GE line of gear looking good.

I still stand by the GE Link Bulbs I have installed directly to ST Hub. Never failed once. Will be great when we get the buttons on the GE 45600 remote linked up to contrillion them. Progress at:

I still regularly have issues with bulbs un-linking. It seems to be the bulbs that are used the most with a manual light switch vs. smart things triggered bulbs.

For instance:

Bulbs that I have triggered to turn off after a set amount of time (utilizing pollster to get the manual on event) seem to never have issue un-linking / un-pairing.

Bulbs that I do not have setup that way eventually lose connection to the hub.

I’m wondering if you are activating the manual unpair function with cycling the power manually. I saw it somewhere that the GE Link Bulb can be unpaired by cycling the power I think 5 times in a row, it will then flash once and unpair. You need to do this if the bulb was not removed from a prior network (i.e. if someone gave you a bulb bu never removed from their network).

Kind of defeats the purpose of having a remote control dimmable bulb if you are turning it off manually, how’s it to report it’s condition if you removed all power from it?

I agree…

It’s not me turning it on and off…that’s the problem :slight_smile:

Still having problems with these bulbs. I needed to have my V2 hub off for a few hours for some wiring changes and the GE bulbs unlinked themselves. so you have to spend an hour removing them from every single phrase of smartapp and then delete them, re pair them and then re add them. Why cant we have a “repair” option on the smartthings app?

Most places are clearancing them for $10.00 and I don’t think they are worth owning.

It’s definitely frustrating when they drop off the network. I’ve been lucky that it happens rarely for me, but when it does, I highly recommend resetting the bulb then have ST search for new devices without removing them from SmartApps or deleting them from ST. The bulbs will reconnect and automatically assume their old device info. ST seems to know where they belong based on their MAC.

Sidenote: Tyler has stated that GE recognizes this as a known firmware issue and is supposed to have a fix/update out before the end of the year.

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Actually I tried what you reccomended and that did not work on the V2 hub they just show up as new lightbulbs. BUT; I went into the developer API and copied the information from the new bulbs down, deleted them, and then edited the old bulbs to use the information from the re-linking of bulbs.

This worked and saved me a TON of time. Thanks!

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I had my V1 hub offline for awhile the other day and most of my GE bulbs let the network during that time. When I re-added them, some of them resumed their former identities but, not all. My assumption is that if they connect through a different repeater or without one when they used one before, they show up as a new device.

I hadn’t thought of that…interesting theory.

I’ve noticed that the bulbs that drop off the most are almost always the same bulbs and all that do are closest to my hub; therefore, my router.

The bulbs furthest away have never once given issue. I have a detached garage that’s at least 50ft from my hub that has a link bulb as an outside light for example…never an issue.

My front porch light and 1 of 2 bulbs in my foyer are both within 5ft of my hub / router and give trouble every other month to every 3rd. month.

When I add them back nothing else changes. They keep their same physical location with other link bulbs in close proximity. 1 bulb in particular will never add back easily. I always have to do the IDE trick.

I guess what is I’m saying is I have not experienced any rhyme or reason.

I think there is more wifi interference than was previously thought in the 2.4 band. As a test I switched to 5ghz for a bit (which alienated my Ecobee3 because they don’t receive 5ghz) but couldn’t stick with it long enough to see if interference has a hand in bulb reliability…I’m betting it does in my environment.

I haven’t had random dropoffs in a long time. I think wifi interference is a big issue, though. I’ve made sure that my router is on the furthest channel (1) from my zigbee channel (24) and that may be why I don’t experience issues very often.

Yes, my issue is that I have so many neighbors that are on either 1, 6, or 11

I’m on 8 now and am.not sharing that channel with anyone, but there is bleed over of signals for those on neighboring channels.

At any rate moving off the 2.4 band entirely would be advantageous…darn you Ecobee3!

Any bulbs I have drop off actually change their ID. so I re add them as new bulbs and copy the ID from the new bulbs to the old ones so I don’t have to waste a hour deleting all the spartans so I can delete the bulb and re add it and then re add all the smartapps.

They really need to give us the ability to “REPLACE” a device instead of having to delete it and everything that looks at it.

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This is something that we’ve asked over 2 years ago. The “hard-linking” of Devices to SmartApps is discussed in many threads. Do a Search :mag: on “Replace Device” or something and see if you can find the most current Topic to contribute to.

In short… The ability to Replace a Device without first uninstalling all linked SmartApps would have the useful side-effect of making Hub to Hub migration a little lot easier.

In the meantime what I do is pair the new replacement device, name it the same as the one you are replacing but add the word New to the end of the name. Then go to smart app view for the bad device. open each smart app and deselect the bad device and select the new one. Then once the all the smart apps from the bad device are switched over you can remove the bad device. Last step is go and edit the name of the replacement device and just delete “new”

HTH

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This is exactly what I do, as well.

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