I have 40 lightify bulbs in the ceiling of my living Room. All connected directly to the ST hub.I have the same problem as many others: Almost every day one or two bulbs become unreachable. I was wondering if I connect 20 bulbs to the hue hub and 20 to ST hub, will this reduce the problem of unreachable bulbs by reducing load on the hubs? By connecting the hue hub to the smartthings hub I can stil control everything from the smartthings app.
First, to get this out of the way: you mean the hue bridge, right? (There is no “hue hub.”)
So, assuming we’re talking about the same thing, this device
Then bulbs which are connected through the hue bridge will likely go off-line less often to SmartThings then Bulbs which are connected directly to SmartThings, but this is because of issues with how SmartThings determines that devices are online which are affecting quite a few people right now. The hue bridge is just smarter in this regard at the present time. It doesn’t have anything to do with a load on the network. You could get down to one bulb directly connected to the SmartThings hub and it might still show as off-line several times a week.
One other issue to be aware of, however, is that most of the zigbee bulbs, and this includes Hue, are unreliable repeaters for the other zigbee devices on your network. Your smartthings hub will think that the bulbs are repeaters, but they tend to lose some messages, which can cause you to think that your sensors are misbehaving when in fact the sensors are reporting the status just fine, but the bulbs are losing the messages.
So if you do connect your bulbs through the hue bridge, you may improve the general performance of your zigbee network just because you won’t have these lost messages.
So that in itself is a good reason to move the bulbs over to the hue bridge. But again, it’s not because of the number of bulbs.
Thank you for your quick response. I mean the hue bridge, and I live in Norway. I had all of my Lightify bulbs connected to my hue bridge. Worked great for a while, but after a power outage I got problems and moved the bulbs to ST. That worked fine for a few days, but then different bulbs started to drop out. One or two different bulbs each day. I have turned off smart Health. Don’t know if it makes any difference.
I’ve been wondering about this recently. I want to move all of my bulbs over to a Hue bridge. I have a Version 1 bridge now. Will the Version 2 bridge work/integrate better? (With Amazon Alexa too?)
I currently have Hue bulbs on the Hue bridge and Cree connected on SmartThings hub. I also ordered a few Ligthify bulbs.
Would you recommend moving all of the bulbs to Hue?
As far as I know, the only difference between the hue bridge one and the hue bridge two is that the hue bridge two supports HomeKit. Which is nice if you have iOS devices, but otherwise irrelevant. I don’t think it affects the SmartThings integration at all.
The hue bridge will work with certified ZLL bulbs, but not with ZHA bulbs. If you are in the US, the Lightify bulbs are probably ZHA, but if you’re in the EU, they’re probably ZLL. So the EU version of those bulbs will work with hue bridge, but the US version will not.
The Cree Connected bulbs should work fine with the hue bridge.
At the present time because of the issue of lost ZHA messages, I’d recommend putting all the bulbs you can on the hue bridge rather than connecting them directly to smartthings with the exception of the Sengled element and the US version of the Sylvania bulbs that have the latest firmware.
So I will probably be better off with moving my Lightify bulbs to the hue bridge. The hue bridge has capacity limits around 50 units, including bulbs, switches and rules. You can use multiple hue bridges but you can only control one at a time from the hue app. You have to change bridge in the app to be able to control bulbs connected to the other bridge. Is it possible to connect multiple hue bridges to ST and thereby control all bulbs simultaneously from the ST app?