Philips Hue lights suddenly unreachable

That might be what SmartThings will tell you…but there’s no guarantee. It does currently work with a lot of devices, and it’s general openness makes it easy for developers (or even casual programmers) to integrate new things. Currently my Hue bridge is humming along (and not breaking). You can apparently bypass the bridge completely and pair bulbs directly with the SmartThings hub, but I’ve not tried it, and it’s also apparently a bit complicated to re-pair with the Hue hub should you change your mind.

I also use “OK Google Now” extensively, and it certainly beats the Echo hands down when performing general internet searches (Bing is the engine of choice right now for the Echo and it sucks).

The Amazon Echo stands out in having an SDK and making it easy for 3rd Parties to integrate…Google has yet to do that with “OK Google”, so we’ll have to just wait and see how they approach things with their “Home” product. The Nest has already seemed to be forgotten about.

Hi,
thanks to Chris Means (@cmeans) beacouse is supporting my idea of upgrading to v2 (just delivered from Amazon right know).

By my experience, this “Unreachable issue” appeared every time I was updating the firmware. Actually I’m stucking in your previous situation, so I hope that upgrading to v2 will give me that same result of your.

Thanks in advance,
Diego

I had the same problem and I was about to throw the whole setup in the bin when I realized it could be an issue between Zigbee and WiFi. My router changes the WiFi channel dynamically, always trying to find the best available channel. It must have made the wrong choice as ALL my Hue lights have suddenly become unreachable. I’ve change the channel manually and everything has magically reappeared. It seem like Zigbee doesn’t particularly like channel 11, so beware. Hope this helps someone with a similar problem.

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Do you know if controlling a Hue light (Bloom) would cause it to be controlled locally?

Can you rephrase that question? I’m not sure what you mean.

Some devices work on the hub and others need the cloud. The latter could take longer to process and would not work if the internet was down.

Some devices don’t use their own hub, but also don’t require access to the cloud. Some rely on WiFi, some on Bluetooth, some on Z-Wave (etc.) the latter does require a hub, but not necessarily a specific one.

The Phillips Hue lights all rely on a hub…either the Phillips Hue Hub, or the SmartThings hub (because it supports the Zigbee protocol)…I’m not positive on that last part, but I do know that you can pair Hue lights to a SmartThings hub directly…I’ve just never done it.

I believe the Phillips Hue lights will continue to work, even if access to the internet has been lost. Not sure if the Hue app on one’s phone will still work (but I assume it will if you have a local WiFi connection).

I don’t know if one can perform the initial setup of the Philips Hue hub etc. without access to the internet, so if you’re living off-the-grid so to speak, you might need to perform some configuration at a location with internet access.

FYI: Though having “control” messages pass through the internet does impact a lag time to the event, unless you’re using dial-up or something, it’s not likely to be too noticeable. If you have a slow local network/WiFi that will impact response time as well.

I have sensors around my cabin that are set to display different colors when they are activated, and turn off when motion stops. So, real-time, as much as possible is desirable. In fact, if a car goes by the driveway it will pass the “red” sensor first and then the “yellow” one. When I had Wink, sometimes they would both trigger correctly, but most of the time one or the other would change but not both. So I was wondering if ST direct to the Hue bulb would be local.

Yes, I would expect that to be local (even if you were using a Hue hub, I’d expect it to be local). However, I believe some SmartThings SmartApps run in the cloud, rather than on the hub, I don’t know what the situations are that impact that, but you’d want to make sure that any automation (sensors triggering actions) you setup would rely on tools/apps that are on the hub vs. the cloud…I assume the only way to be sure would be to disconnect from the internet and try it.

Hopefully, someone more knowledgeable will chime in.

I do have a link that shows (for me) what devices are local. My Hue hub and bulbs do not show up there.

When you say a “link” you mean you have a web page (whether it’s served by
a local server or one in the cloud), right? Or do you mean you’ve got a
phone or computer based app?

Is this something that’s available to me to see (for my network)? Maybe
I’d be able to help more.

The Hue hub, definitely connects to a local network…it can’t get to the
internet any other way (except through a router). The bulbs would only be
visible to something that is “Zigbee” aware…I don’t know enough about the
protocol to know whether Zigbee devices are “discoverable” even if already
paired with a hub.

You might find this helpful:

https://www.developers.meethue.com/documentation/how-hue-works

This is the link that works for me ->
https://graph-na02-useast1.api.smartthings.com/localDevice

What local processing means (to this newbie) is that the device handler runs on the Smarthings hub and does not need cloud processing.

I was having the same problem. Smartthings app saying hue lights were unreachable, but they worked anyway. I just shut off device health and everything is fine now. Seems like the problem is with that function. Doesn’t seem to work, so just ignoring it for now.

Same problem here but with the v2 Starter Kit. Used it for a month without issues with the Phillips Hue app.

Yesterday one of the bulbs became unreachable but managed to find it again by searching with the bulb ID.
Today all 3 of them suddenly unreachable.

Searching for the bulb IDs, multiple bridge restarts, physically turning off/on the bulbs, no change.
Edit: Searching for the bulb IDs, the bulbs flash once while the process runs, but in the end the app says that no bulbs have been found.

After a bridge factory reset the bulbs started working, set up again the scenes, colors and as I finished all these steps it happened again.

Now even the factory reset won’t help, the bulbs act as ordinary lightbulbs only.

Edit 2: The solution might be in this post of http://tobias-tobin.blogspot.com/, my Hue Bridge was right next to the WiFi router. Will update if placing the bridge further away helped, right now it seems it does.

Just to give a quick feedback that I recently experienced.
Same issues as reported above… Hue bridge 1 with 18-20 lights set up across 3 separate rooms. Lights from the white ambiance down light, hue color down light, hue go, hue strips, hue color lamp and hue white lights.
Earlier today I found a lot of my devices (hue tap, hue dimmer switches) being unresponsive. Lights were not working through the echo/Alexa commands and when checking the light statuses, they showed as unavailable. I tried unplugging hue bridge, unscrewing and rescrewing in the various lights, moving the bridge etc. Nothing seemed to work.
What I failed to realize was while this was going on, I was transferring a large data block (10 gigs?) across my wifi connection from a home server to a home laptop. I was doing all of this over wifi. It APPEARS as though that was throttling the network speed and causing a disconnect between my bridge and all of my lights. Once i cancelled the transfer, everything appeared to be back in working order. I’m not happy this occurred (with a Fios Gigabit connection) but at least 1 more thing to consider when troubleshooting this issue.
I’ll report back if this occurs again. I’m thankful i did not have to go and buy a new bridge unnecessarily.

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This is happening to me right now and I’m not downloading anything at all. 2 of my 10 hue lights are reachable. The rest are not. After reading this, I guess I just need to wait and pray they come back and I’ll assume it’s not my hardware etc.

(Smacking forehead) You NAILED the problem I was having. “All of a sudden”, random bulbs were “unreachable”; which just happened to coincide with backing up an 8TB drive over WiFi. I feel like this should be higher in the ranking. Hopefully, my “like” and response will help.

Just registered in here to give this post a big fat like! I just bought a Philips HUE hub today with two simple white bulbs and a LED strip. Been playing around with it all day and just when I was about to go to bed, the set “go to bed” scene wasn’t working and it seemed that all my lamps were unreachable. While trying to solve this problem I came across your post and realised that I was pulling about 120 GB of movies from my NAS to an external drive on my iMac (which connects over WiFi). I stopped the transfer and immediately my light went back to “connected”. Thank you so much for this simple CONCLUSION. Now all I need to do is come up with a simple SOLUTION. Probably just need to connect my iMac over ethernet instead of WiFi…

This happened to me recently for the second time. The first time I ended up resetting the bridge to factory default settings to get every back up and running. This time I did more digging and tried everything else prior to your post, Sergio. I realized that my router does the same and when I checked what channel it was on and wouldn’t you know it that it was on 11. I changed it to 10 and everything is now working again.