How can I reduce the delay between grouped lights?

Configuration
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1

I have a light fixture that contains five Philips Hue bulbs, and in HA I’ve grouped them:

- platform: group
  name: Living Room Light
  entities:
    - light.living_room_lamp_1
    - light.living_room_lamp_2
    - light.living_room_lamp_3
    - light.living_room_lamp_4
    - light.living_room_lamp_5

When I turn on Living Room Light, there’s a small (300-500 ms) but jarring delay between when the individual bulbs turn on. When I use the Hue or Google Home apps there’s no perceptible delay; the bulbs are perfectly in sync. When I use Homekit via the Apple Home app there’s a tiny (100ms) delay; almost imperceptible.

Why is HA’s delay so much greater, and can anything be done to reduce it?

Some extra info: my HA instance is running on a VM (3G RAM, 2 vCPU) hosted by a Mac Mini using the standard disk image. Core + Supervisor CPU usage is around 3% and RAM 8%.

2

Hue is zigbee right?
Tried binding them?

3

I’m using the standard Hue integration. What do you mean by binding them?

4

Why are you not using Light Groups?

Not sure if it would make a difference, but it’s worth testing out.

1 Like
5

I was under the impression that I am using Light Groups?

This is what I based my config above on. Is there an alternate implementation?

6

Apologies, my mistake.

I group lights through the GUI ZHA interface. And I experience no delay if I address a group, rather than multiple individual lights.

7

Are you on the latest version of HA?

Hue integration now supports PUSH which removes the delay.

Previously the only way I worked around it was to remove the light from the Hue bridge and pair it with my ZHA via a deconz USB

Also, you can enable Group support on the Hue integration in hA via UI which means if you’ve created a group in Hue, you will see it in HA

8

Yep, I just started using HA yesterday, so I’m on the latest stable version: core-2021.6.6.

I visited Configuration > Integrations > Hue > Configure and checked “Allow Hue Groups”. The groups that I had created in the Hue app immediately appeared, and when using these from HA the delay is gone!

Thank you very much!