Adaptive/Natural Lighting Hue Bulbs + V2 Dimmer – Most reliable method?

Configuration
1

Morning!

I recently purchased Philips Hue bulbs for the house. Some are single bulbs, some are sets of 4 (GU10s for kitchen/bathroom, for example). With a Philips Hue Bridge (V2.1), i created groups for these bulbs, then with the Philips Hue integration imported all the entities to HA, including the unified ones.

Within the Philips Hue app, I tried Natural Light, but don’t like being that limited. It works fairly well, but i want more control, hence HA. I also ideally dont want to need to change schedules when time zones change, but letting a system follow my circadian rhythm

I also had previously tried Z2M, where i added all devices, including the Dimmer V2 remote. I binded the remote to the light group (created in Z2M) and it worked great. I couldn’t however make automations execute reliably. Automations to either map the “hue” button on the remote, or to manually set a schedule like Adaptive Lighting. This was my first attempt and honestly can’t remember exactly what I’d done there, but remember experiencing some challenges.

Now with the Adaptive Lighting integration, I’m not sure how happy i am with how it functions. Lights are almost always way too warm and a bit too bright say, past 11pm. I’ve tweaked it to my best, but some automations still don’t execute that well nor reliably. For example, I have it so my main power button (1st) turn on/off, the dimmer buttons (2nd and 3rd) are default (still mapped in the Philips Hue app so it’s perfectly smooth – while keeping the on/off and hue buttons to do nothing), and the hue button (4th) activates adaptive lighting. Also long pressing the on/off button does 100% cool brightness and long pressing “hue” does warm 1% dimmed. This works well for the most part, but sometimes feel unresponsive. Also when I do the 1% dimming (long pressing “hue”), it usually blasts bright light, then dims to my 1%, which beats the purpose when brushing my teeth right before bed, for example.

Another annoyance, although unsure how related it is to be above, is HomeKit integration. Most things work great, except for these groups of lights I mentioned earlier (kitchen, bathroom). They sometimes become fully unresponsive, meaning it struggles to display the correct status or brightness percentage. A bit janky overall.

I’m just wondering how you guys set yours up! I must be doing something wrong here, as this must be one of the most common HA configurations.

Thanks!

2

You’re not doing anything especially wrong — this setup just has too many things writing the same lamps.

The flash-to-full then 1% is classic Hue group behaviour: the group first gets a default on (often last/full brightness), then Adaptive Lighting or your long-press writes the real target. For the toothbrush scene, send one light.turn_on with brightness_pct: 1, color_temp_kelvin: 2000 and transition: 0 (or 0.4). If Adaptive Lighting is allowed to take over right after, it will yank the brightness back up. Use adaptive_lighting.set_manual_control on that group for night scenes, or give Adaptive Lighting a hard night ceiling (max 5–8% and about 1800–2200K after 23:00). The default sleep curve is often still too bright for a bathroom at that hour.

On the Dimmer V2: keep the bind you already liked for on/off/dim (Z2M or Hue, one path only). Map the Hue button in HA if you want, but don’t also let the Hue app own those same buttons. Two controllers on one remote is why it feels laggy.

Kitchen/bathroom GU10 groups + HomeKit: expose the individual bulbs to HomeKit, keep the Hue zone/group only in HA. HomeKit going stale on Hue groups is mostly sync lag from stacked group entities.

And turn off Hue Natural Light on those rooms while Adaptive Lighting is running. Circadian from two apps will always look too warm because they fight.