HUE Bulbs working / not working randomly in automations / scenes

Configuration
1

Hi everyone,

i have a hue bridge and around 20 bulbs connected to it. Everything works well.
i do have all this integrated in home assistand and it works well - well almost.

I do have two rooms with 5-8 bulbs each. Some of them are grouped in HA some are not.
Now i do have set up some scenes and automations to turn these on/off/dim etc.

Here is my problem: sometimes some of these bulbs (grouped or not does’nt matter) are not responding and doing what the scene/automations says. They just keep their state (on or of or whatever in between). When i trigger them again they doing what they’re supposed to do. But sometimes not. I can see no system there as is not always the same bulb, sometimes it is one of three in the same lamp, sometimes it is another on (same room)…

The only thing i can think of, is that it has to to something with my triggering. I do use a simple

light.turn_on

or

light.turn_off

with a

transition: xx (ranging from 3 to 1800 secs)

If i switch, change or do something manually in HA all works as expected…

Does anybody have an idea on that. I know, it’s quite hazy, but … :slight_smile:

Thanks!

2

how about you post your whole automation instead of us all guessing what you are doing.

3

Sorry, i was not sure if i am missing something general besides the code here.
Here is one of the automations:

- id: wohnzimmer_abends_sonne
  alias: Wohnzimmer Sonnenuntergang
  initial_state: on
  trigger:
    platform: sun
    event: sunset
    offset: -3600
  action:
    service: light.turn_on
    data:
      entity_id:
      - light.anrichte_rechts
      - light.anrichte_links
      - light.couch_unten
      - light.couch_mitte
      - light.couch_oben
      - light.claudi_sekretar
      - light.wz_katzenecke
      - light.spule
      brightness: 254
      color_temp: 366
      transition: 1800

I would say on every second try one of the bulbs (not the same every time) “stucks” at what ever state it is. Even if it is “couch” which are merely 20 cm away from each other. But as i said, could be any lamp on this automation that fails to react on triggering the automation…

Switching the bulbs via HUE or Homekit works flawlessly.

4

I think you need to create groups in the hue app (I think they call them “rooms”) and use these groups instead of the individual lights.

The problem is that the Hue hub (or any other ZigBee hub) can not handle a lot of requests coming in at the same time. With your automation 8 requests are sent at the same time, so some of these requests might get delayed or not delivered at all. HA groups don’t improve this behaviour, if you create a HA group with 3 lights, there will be 3 requests sent to the hub. If you create a ZigBee group with 3 lights, only one request will be sent.

1 Like
5

Yeah, that makes actually sense. Thank you for that.
It might be even worse as i have about 3 of those automations run at the same time sometimes (sunset etc.). And it’s hard to grasp as an error, as it shows up so randomly (random bulbs at random triggering).
Most of the time it works just fine. But that seems to be luck then, right?

But how do i access the groups/rooms i created in the hue app?
I do see all the single bulbs and switches via the “integrations” in HA as entities, but no groups/rooms from Hue. Just the ones i created in HA.

6

There is an option “allow_hue_groups: true” that you can add to the Hue hub config, however it defaults to true, so not sure why it is not working. Did you try removing the integration and adding it again?

7

Oh my god, you’re my hero! :slight_smile:

i did set the “allow_hue_groups” to “false”. Don’t remember when or why.
Now i see the rooms and the first manually triggered test with an automation using just the room instead of the bulbs just works fine!

I even discovered a new beta feature called “zones” in the hue app. Maybe we can use this in the future. For now i have to create rooms in the hue app, even if i only want to use a group of bulbs in this room. Messy :wink:

However, for now i can more than live with creating a room containing my “grouped bulbs” and using this in HA. It even works with “transition:”. Great.
I will have to watch it for some days (if it works every time as expected), but you just saved my day.

And it seems, my suspicions were right. It was not really the automation code. Seems to be a more general “problem” with Zigbee and lots of requests…

Thank you again! :slight_smile:

EDIT: Even better: The new feature zones (as in groups) is working in the hue app AND is discovered in HA. So no more mess with rooms in Hue if you just want a group of bulbs! Yeah.

1 Like