Starting a company making Zigbee bulbs would be a huge undertaking. It is good that OSRAM figured this out and has a solution. It is a pain that the end customer has to keep changing bulbs because the idiots at the Zigbee SIG did not think of using the devices in the real world.
Turning automated light bulbs on and off reliably in the year 2015 should not be this difficult.
This thread has actually made me rethink my plan of deployment.
There are some places that I will only use the lights… like in the kitchen. I like being able to have individual control over the bulbs along with dimming. Sometimes (in the morning before coffee) 5 bright lights in the kitchen are just waaaayyyy to much.
But, there are other places that I never dim the lights… like the dining room, hall, stairs, garage, laundry… those are all going to get switches now. That way, when the power cycles they will not all come back on at full power.
If you are on vacation just physically turn off the lights before your leave. If you have others on a timer app, they should turn off and on at the designated times.
In 1985 that would have been a good suggestion. In 2015 we should a home automation systems that has some basic smarts.
I always judge how easy a system is to use based on the parent model. If my parents can use a product with out calling me 3 times a week it is ready for prime time. Zigbee based lighting needs some work.
you can put a dimmer in the kitchen. question i have is what is the power draw on the bulbs with lights off per bulb?
That is true about the dimmer in the kitchen. But my wife likes having the control over each bulb as well. When she is cooking she has the entire kitchen lit up. When she’s making her coffee, only the light above the coffee station is lit… At about 5%.
I don’t know what the power draw is on a bulb when turned off. I’ve been meaning to hook my kill-o-watt up to one and find out.
I will try to remember to do that tonight.
Small but measurable. From one engineering report on Hue:
When the bulb is on and set to maximum brightness, it consumes about 0.08-0.09 Amps (about 5.4 Watts). In the off state (but still drawing some power so that it can communicate with the network), each bulb draws around 0.01 to 0.02 Amps (about 0.4 Watts). As expected, even when the LEDs are off power draw is not zero. The ZigBee network controller and other circuitry need to remain active in order to listen for communications from the
I have a full house monitoring system. Here are some screen shots of 9 GE Wink bulbs. They are my outside lights.
No power going to Zigbee lights
All lights off, Zibee bulbs powered - 120V / 2W = .017A
All lights 100% on - 120V / 80W = .667A
All lights 1% on - 120V / 7W = .058A
I got this message on my phone today.
The wife called and told me all the lights are on full bright throughout the house. I spend more time babysitting this system then its worth. I am shocked this flaw does not effect more people.
I presume you are just referring to smart bulbs, right? Not lights on Z-Wave or ZigBee switches & outlets?
Behavior of smart bulbs upon reset from power failures is the least of SmartThings’s problems, frankly. At least the bulbs are behaving as designed.
I have a few Hue and GE Link bulbs on a Philips Hue Bridge (and SmartThings via the bridge), and the behavior is the same and it is correct to spec. I presume Wink Hub doesn’t have a workaround either.
This is not SmartThings’s responsibility, right??
This is why I completely rethought my system design. I am in the process of changing to as many switches as possible.
And on that note, I’m about to have roughly 15-20 GE link bulbs for sale. 
You guys are lucky ones who have the luxury of using smart switches. We in old houses rely on smart bulbs. 
but then hue sets my mood!
And I’d buy a few. They work great for me, but we’ve not had many power outages.
The only place I’d be concerned is in the bedroom, as I like sleeping through night power outages and dealing with any aftereffects in the morning. Having bedroom lights on full brightness at a 3am power restore is definitely undesirable… But only there, and tolerable if power outages are rare, and probably tolerable if I had a SmartApp that powered them off within a 30 seconds…
Are any the BR30 kind? I’d be interested in buying some also.
Power outages for me are extremely rare. But, I’m changing them anyway.
I guess to be honest I’m changing them to a) give me something to do and b) neatness.
It just seems much more efficient to me to have one switch in my things list instead of the five bulbs that one switch controls.
I’m actually eliminating 17 bulbs and installing only 5 switches.
It’s just easier to manage that way.
All of my bulbs are GE Link A19 bulbs.
I will part with them for 10.00 a piece plus shipping.
SmartThings can fix it. An app can store the last known state of a bulb and return it to that state on hub power up. The hub knows when it comes out of a power outage.
Agreed that it is within the scope of the platform to add this as a feature.
But, ummm… I presume you’re generally aware of the dozens and dozens of issues, bugs, and feature requests that SmartThings has? Just browse the Forum for 30 minutes… I’ll wait here…
Was I right?
Now SmartThings has to prioritize every single change to the platform and run it through their lengthy design, develop, test (sometimes 
), release, fix, re-release cycle.
Furthermore, the “last known state of a switch” is frequently not accurately stored in SmartThings currently, due to various limitations and bugs. So have to fix that first.
Then there are complicated options, as discussed, such as whether or not lights that were on before bedtime should return to on after bedtime and other variations (frankly, I believe every arbitrary set of lights (rooms, whatever) should have a scene based on mode and schedule and this is what should be restored upon power resumed… But there still could be exceptions…).
Finally, power outage is a relatively infrequent edge case (unlike the currently flaky “sunset” trigger which is used daily by a huge proportion of users).
I’ll leave it to the reader to put yourself in the shoes of SmartThings management to prioritize this non-trivial Feature Request and assign resources and a time frame for release. Do this while those shoes (and your feet) are in the current raging bonfires…
In other words… Don’t hold your breath, but don’t inhale the smoke either.
I’m kind of surprised no one has made a custom smartapp that would do this. Since the V2 hub can survive a power outage, there should be a way with virtual switches to ensure that everything is as it should be.
I may be oversimplifying it, as I haven’t taken a look at groovy’s documentation and that I’ve only been using smartthings for about a month, I’m mostly a C++ coder so I’m not used to restrictive scripting languages. Buttttt…
For every physical light, assign a virtual light to it that follows the same schedule and ruleset. When the hub detects a power outage, and recovers from that power outage, wait x number of minutes to allow the network to rebuild, then refresh the status of all lights and set them to the same state as the virtual light. Bonus points if these virtual lights could be run locally, since that would keep them in sync with your normal schedule. Alternatively, the hub could poke all devices every 30 seconds until they respond, and then fix each light as they become available.
This type of implementation would look sloppy as far as the device list goes, since everything would be duplicated. If there is a way to hide devices, this would be the perfect place to use it.
Even if Smartthings was the smartest system in the world without any bugs and development staff sitting around twiddling their thumbs any such app would/could not be entirely reliable. A power outage can make one or more of these dang bulb inaccessible and must be reset before any app/person can get control of them again. Anyone with GE link and/or Wemo LED who has experienced a PF will know what I mean 
Nope. Seriously… nope. I’ve cut power to my home several times (obviously doing SmartThings installs and such), and have never lost a GE Link Bulb connectivity.
All my bulbs are connected via a Hue Bridge (UPS, I think) – perhaps that is why I’m just “anyone”.
