Lost Devices

[rgrandy (Ryan)]

Do other platforms (Hubitat, Home Assistant, etc) have the same amount of trouble with devices going unavailable. I have trouble with smart bulbs, Cree and Sengled. They seem to go unavailable very often, usually after power outages and seemingly sometimes in between. It is rather frustrating that it happens so often. Just curious if this is just a ST thing or a smart home thing.

• Ryan

[sidjohn1]

If your Zigbee mesh is not solid and it sounds like it’s very possible… then it won’t matter what platform you are on.

Sengled Classic bulbs going offline constantly

I about a dozen of these bulbs setup and working perfectly around the house, but I have a set of 3 in a chandelier and they are constantly going offline multiple times a day. I rarely have all 3 working a the same time. They all have the newest firmware. Any ideas why they might be going offline? Do I just have a few bad apples? Is it an issue 3 being close together? i wouldnt think so as I have 2 in another ceiling light that work fine.

FAQ: 32 Zigbee direct connection device limit?

Zigbee bulbs are notorious for being poor repeater devices, IMHO. Also, they are subject to be powering off by wall switches, or lamp switches, thereby causing the Zigbee mesh to have issues. The great thing about Sengled bulbs is that they are not Zigbee repeaters. Therefore, the mesh is never impacted if someone turns a bulb off via a physical power switch. I would encourage the use of a good smart outlet that is known to repeat signals well for your devices (i.e. the Xiaomi devices seem to be the most picky, since they are not Zigbee HA compliant devices.) I use Lowes Iris 3210-L outlets and have not had any issues with my zigbee mesh. Note, these outlets are known to not play well with Xiaomi devices.

Hub Firmware Release Notes - 0.24.11

I started the home automation thing with Wink. For more than a year is was more or less a downhill slog. GE bulbs that would not stay connected zwave switches that were hard to pair and also disconnected. And there was little functionality by comparison to what Smartthings was offering at that time. Several Wink community members switched to Smartthings and would post about how they were more satisfied after they made the switch to Smartthings. After a couple of months I took their cue and bought a hub when STs first shipped their version 2 hub. Unlike with Wink the first year with STs had a lot of good positive activity. And then the move to version 3 hub and the new app. In the months before all the version 3 stuff came out several STs community members made the switch to Hubitat. Base…

[rgrandy (Ryan)]

I had been doing the zigbee rebuild (pull HUB power for 15min) to no improvements over the last few days. Eventually all my zigbee devices went offline.

I finally started looking at the wireless channels, I moved the WIFI channel to the other end of the spectrum, and did another rebuild, I also added another plug. Almost immediately the zigbee devices started getting recognized.

It seems like the wifi channel did the trick (I noticed it was on auto, so perhaps sometimes it was on an overlapping channel and sometimes it wasn’t, maybe that can account for the changes in performance).

It would be nice if there were some easy diagnostics that could be run to figure this stuff out. I can see how if someone isn’t technically inclined, that this system would just feel like it doesn’t work well, when maybe it just needs to be tuned a little bit.

I still have some devices giving me trouble and some that are really laggy but seeing the difference the channel selection made, makes me feel like it is just a matter of tweaking a little bit more.

• Ryan