I have 113 device connected to my Smartthings hub about 3/4 of those devices are Zigbee. I recently switched from Wink to Smartthings. Over the last week 10-15 Zigbee devices have been falling off the network on an almost daily basis. Mostly Zigbee bulbs (Osram, GE Link, and Cree) but every time it happens some entry and motions fall off too. The entry and motion sensor I just pull the battery and they reconnect, the bulbs I need to use the “blink” method to rest them then rediscover them. Most of bulb that are falling off I used in my old Wink setup with no problems.
I chatted with support and they recommend removing the Osram bulbs, moving the hub, and buying some smart outlets to help with repeating. I followed all of their recommendation, including spending over $200 to add smart outlets to each room to help with repeating. I’m still having devices fall off every day. Any suggestions?? Is their anyway to change the Zigbee channel incase it is interference causing all of these problems?
No, but you can force your zigbee mesh to rebuild now that you have the repeaters in place. Completely power down your hub (no batteries) for at least 15 minutes (I usually wait 30), and power back up. I can’t search the community now, but there’s a thread on how to force the zigbee mesh to rebuild.
You did remove the Osram bulbs? Those were my problem.
If everything worked fine with wink and you’ve done the rebuild as @johnconstantelo recommended and you’re still having problems it’s almost certainly a conflict between SmartThings and the Osram bulbs, unfortunately.
The bulbs are capable of acting as a zigbee repeater but for whatever reasons that does not seem to work well with SmartThings right now, although I think it did last year. So what happens is that some of the messages get lost.
Adding additional pocket sockets or light switches or other zigbee repeaters can help, but only if the remaining zigbee devices choose those to be the repeaters. You can’t force a specific routing through zigbee, it’s basically done on the basis of what signal is the strongest. There are community members that have found that the only thing that worked was to remove the Osram bulbs altogether.
I know that’s not the answer anyone wants to hear, but it seems to be the only choice for some installations right now.
With the V2 hub, if you completely factory reset the hub (which means you would have to start from scratch in adding all your devices and creating all your logic) it will randomly reassigned the zigbee channel. But you can’t specify which channel it should select the next time and it might even select the same one again. It’s just random what you get. So if you are starting a brand-new installation you can keep doing it over until you get the channel you want. But otherwise it’s not much help.
In this particular case, though, it doesn’t seem to be related to the specific channel that you’re on, there’s just a known issue with the Osram bulbs failing to act as reliable repeaters on a SmartThings network.
@er1c8, this was exactly my problem. I worked with one of ST’s lead engineers for zigbee, and we played with router settings, and a whole bunch of other things for almost a month. As soon as I removed my Osram bulbs and rebuilt my zigbee mesh, I’ve been rock solid ever since.
Supposedly there is a firmware update for the bulbs, but if you don’t have an Osram Lightify hub, you’ll have to wait for ST to implement over the air (OTA) firmware update capabilities. I’m still convinced that even with the latest firmware that the Osram bulb is still a bit problematic. I hope this gets fixed soon because I do like Osram’s strips and I’d like to use those too some day.
Did you heal the network after you removed the Osrams? Take out the hub batteries and unplug the hub. Leave everything else on power. After about 30 minutes, plug the hub back in and the zigbee devices will start rebuilding their address tables. This process can take a while so you might not see improvement until the next day.
Yeah I have done that every time I had to re add the bulbs that lost their connection, including after I removed the Osrams. I’m wondering if one of my other bulbs is bad and it is dropping connection causing all of the device connected to it to lose their connections. Except I thought that if a device in the mesh lost it connection to the network because it’s parent went offline it would find a new device to connect too. I could be wrong.
Its not just osram, its also cree i know that…it hit me. If you have say more than 8-10 bulbs, remove down to that point. I think Osram and Cree’s use the same basic stack in terms of the DTH so you might be boned. I know once I moved down to under 10 cree bulbs directly connected to ST I was fine. Think this goes for only the white bulbs, I have 4 rgb/w osram lights as well and have been stable.
Zigbee will not self heal like you are saying. If a child loses its parent, it takes a long time for it to recover. I could ‘simulate’ that when my issues of control were going on. Light wouldn’t turn off, I could go in hit refresh on the device, wait about 10-15 seconds, then the light would be controllable at least for that moment. Next day who knows.
Honestly, if you have a hue hub, pair at least the cree’s to the hue. Getting osram on there requires too many hoops for my liking. But since I moved like 90% of my lights to hue my system has been dang near 100% stable.
It will if it can. The question is a) does it know the other device exists (that’s what the heal does) and b) is there another repeater within range.
(you probably already know this, but for others who may read this later only mains powered devices can be repeaters. Battery powered devices are not because it would use up too much battery to keep repeating messages for other devices.)
Ideally you would have two available repeaters about every 15 m physically. Or even two per room to be really safe. Then you would know that every device had a choice of at least two options.
Unfortunately, neither wink nor SmartThings give customers the network map, so you can’t see exactly which repeaters are being used.
0 issues so far. I am on a v1 ST hub and a gen2 Hue. I had a gen1 but one of the starter kits for Hue had a gen2. But still yet I’ve had no problems. I haven’t seen the delays as some did but I also live alone and have very rudimentary automation. Only ‘issue’ I have is in the kitchen I have 2 cree’s and 5 br30’s from hue. The hue’s come on 1,2,3,4,5 in a row and a little slower than the Cree’s. So its noticeable but not like super annoying. The Hue bulbs themselves I find to be a little slow compared to the Cree’s, and also a little dimmer. So for white only I still say the Cree’s are about the best bulb you can get. RGBW, Hue is pretty solid. I’ve not used lifx but them being wifi could have their own issues.
If you can find someone selling a gen1 hue grab it, I got one off this forum for 20 bucks. I just gave away 3 of them actually since I got the gen2. The only difference in the hubs is gen2 can do homekit.
It really has solved my issues. I have at least 20 cree bulbs…my count was from April, I think I added some. But I also added 10 hue bulbs as well. Have a set of osram gardenspots, 2 rgbw led strips, and 1 rgbw can light. I have maybe 8 cree bulbs on my ST hub, the rest of the Cree’s are on the hue. Osram all on ST. Have about 65 ‘things’ in ST which also includes the hue bulbs shared to it. And I’ve been solid for months, only minor hiccups which were usually cloud related. I hate saying spend money on Hue, but until they figure out this bug on Cree/Osram bulbs, anymore than 8 and all the crap goes haywire.
I’ve been having problems with Zigbee devices over the last couple months. GE bulbs, motion sensors, contact sensors all randomly drop off. It’s always fixed by resetting the battery, but this is getting super annoying. Out of around 20 devices, I’m resetting about one per day.
Off hand, this sounds more like a range/interference issue than a Zigbee mesh network mapping issue. Have tried enabling insecure rejoin? This will allow a trusted device to reconnect if it falls off the network (rather than be stuck on the outside looking in).
I did create a ticket a couple weeks ago, but right after I did, things seemed to get stable for a couple days.[quote=“Aaron, post:16, topic:58741”]
Have you tried enabling insecure rejoin?
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Yes, it’s enabled on the hub. I may try the suggestion elsewhere in the forums of leaving the hub powered off for 15 minutes to trigger a zigbee mesh rebuild.
I did some more detailed troubleshooting this weekend. I moved the hub to a separate room that doesn’t have a wireless router in it. I also left the hub unplugged for 15 minutes.
Today, I noticed 3 devices dropped off my network. I also noticed that the last events logged for all 3 of them were between a brief window of 8 minutes. I checked the hub’s event list during that time period and found two entries that occurred 1 minute after that window. I’m not sure what those entries mean, but I’m guessing they triggered my 3 zigbee devices to fall off. The hub entries look something like
That entry has noting to do with your zigbee devices dropping. There’s a device on your LAN trying to communicate to ST. The IP address in that entry is hex, so convert it to see where it’s coming from:
