I’m getting to the point where I am so tired of my Zigbee bulbs just going on and offline all the time for no good reason. I saw a support article that Hue can work with ST locally now using the Hue bridge to talk on the local network. Have people have good success with this? Are Hue bulbs more likely to stay connected?
Never had any issues with my Hue lights via the Hue bridge and ST.
By any chance, are you using Osram lightbulbs? They do the same with the Hue bridge too, but they can be controlled.
Anyhow the Hue and ST integartion are quite solid, they work well together.
Hmm, it’s hard to remember for sure, because it’s been a while since I made changes to the bulbs (and in between I had a baby who is now 19 months old), but yes, they probably are all OSRAM bulbs, both white tunable and full color. I think the bulb types were what inspired me to go with the OSRAM offerings when they arrived.
So in your experience those bulbs in particular are prone to this disconnection issue? That’s unfortunate. I wonder what the deal is.
I’d probably go with Hue products on the Hue hub if I made the switch. In the past, I shied away from going to Hue because it was a cloud integration (and partly because Hue devices are less interoperable or at least they were). But I don’t have as much time or brainpower to devote to figuring this stuff out, so I might be willing to switch over to Hue if it’s easier.
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You can search around the community forum about issues with Osram bulbs. They are not a good zigbee repeaters as default. My experience with white E27 bulbs (5 of them in a group), that they continuously disconnect, but that is the report by the Hue bridge where they are connected. Meanwhile they are fully controllable and they report the state correctly.
I have one bulb in the Smartthings side too. As alone it hasn’t caused any issues, but I have around a lot of IKEA Tradfri bulbs for support and other devices to compensate the zigbee mesh and to avoid the bad repeater.
Otherwise color bulbs were falling like dead flies. They became dead less than a year. Luckily Amazon’s warranty helped to swap.
Hue bulbs are generally amazing. I have 3 of them which came with a starter kit about 5-6 years ago and they are still working. They are really stable. I have just swapped the v1 bridge to a v2 as v1 is at kinda EOL, as it receives less support.
You can find deals for Hue bulbs time to time to keep cost down. Colors are the best with Hue bulbs. (I have Hue, Osram, IKEA and LIFX bulbs.) For cheap option, you can replace Osram bulbs with IKEA ones. They are stable and has good connectivity to Smartthings, except pairing sometimes a bit awkward, but then it works.
Hue has its “works with Hue” as I remember, and they dropped some producers before, maybe that’s why you think about bad interconnectivity, but if you keep lights on the Hue bridge then no issue for Smartthings. The Hue app works well without internet on the local network too.
Hue works great. There is an annoying issue right now caused by a recent ST hub FW update that manifests itself as hue devices constantly showing offline/online in device history but it does not affect actual device performance and the bulbs will usually show as online in the Device/Things list as the offline/online is very quick to cycle. Once in a blue moon a bulb will actually show as offline but it’s controllable still. I believe ST are working on resolving this anyway.
I have not regretted moving to Hue one bit.
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Thanks for that info! Probably almost all of my mains powered Zigbee devices are the OSRAM bulbs at this point. I think I have one Cree bulb still in use. And then battery-powered sensors, but I’m pretty sure those don’t repeat. So if the OSRAM’s aren’t repeating, that could well explain a good deal of my issues.
I’ve been using an ST hub for probably over five years now. So the last time I gave serious thought to the Hue bulbs was probably at least 4 years ago, but I decided to go with Zigbee bulbs that connected directly to the ST hub. I then put Hue out of mind because I’d chosen the other path, so I hadn’t been paying attention to changes over time.
I loved to tinker with ST for the first couple years. At this point, though, I think I need to start looking for as streamlined of device integrations and smart apps as I can get. I stay at home with a small child now and I can’t keep a train of thought on the tracks to save my life. 
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There will be an update in the next firmware release to address the issue of frequent online/offline transitions of Hue devices. A 60 second debounce period will be added when reachable == false state events are received from the Hue bridge. This allows us to ignore erroneous reachable state changes received from the bridge and propagate up legitimate ones.
I strongly encourage anyone experiencing frequent Hue offline/online events to participate in the next Hub firmware beta!
Barry
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Believe me, I understand what you are talking about. I am making my wife nuts at home. But she is happy with some of my “toys” making her life easier.
If you are looking for some fancy light changes, then definitely look at Hue. It has its own scenes, and some animated lights, like fireworks, Christmas lightings, etc. And something what they call labs, like candle/fireplace like flickering and many other. My daughter (4), for example, loves to dance with the lights changing with the music/sounds too. That is another feature in one of the Hue control apps. Suddenly I am not aware how you can control these from Smartthings, but Hue works for lights as itself. And there is development behind it for dynamic light changes, like ambilight for TV.
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Here the same problem with the Hue bridge and the firmware 27.9.
Lamps are online/offline in a 1 minute rhythm. I have one hue bulb and 2 led strip controllers from Gledopto.
Those 3 are connected via the Hue bridge.
Other lamps (Ikea) connected to the SmartThings hub directly don’t have this problem.
Switching the 3 lights connected to the Hue bridge on/off fails often. I have a wireless pushbutton and a Webcore piston, both fail to control the lamps when they are offline at that moment.
SmartThings support tries to help me.
Before the firmware update Hue works fine.
Grtn Ben
Yes, that is the issue I was referring to.
Thanks for chiming in, folks. I just ordered a color 4 bulb starter kit for pickup at Target because I happened to see that they have a 20% off cartwheel deal for some Hue stuff.
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That is what I have - plus a 5th bulb I bought later. All 5 have been rock solid. Hue is awesome. It is one of the few constant steady positive experiences I have in my now sprawling smart home ecosystem. The key is to control them through the Hue hub instead of directly.
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I too find Hue and the SmartThings integration to be very reliable. I have two Hue bridges and over 50 lights, both indoor and outdoor now. Not the cheapest but reliability and functionality are excellent.