Hue Hub-like Behavior with Zigbee2MQTT

Hi all -

I’m playing around with moving my Hue bulbs from the Hue Hub over to Z2M, primarily to have a single zigbee mesh, as well as keeping everything local. I’ve got a couple of bulbs moved over, which was pretty easy. However, I’m finding that Z2M doesn’t behave quite like the Hue Hub in HA and I’m wondering if anyone has advice for what settings I need to use to mimic the hub behavior. Specifically I’m looking for the following:

  • If I manually shutoff power to a bulb I want it to show as “off” in HA (ideally quickly).
  • If I manually shutoff power to a bulb I don’t want it to ever get to a disconnected state in HA, I want it to just show as being off.
  • When I turn a manually shutoff bulb back on I want it to be able to go back to the previous state, but if the previous state was off I should be able to do a single powercycle and have it turn on.

Other than that I think everything works quite well, just want to be able to mix fully automation controlled bulbs with manually controlled switches. Works great with Hue, and I’m sure there’s some sort of setting I can work with Z2M that will make it work.

Any help is greatly appreciated! Thanks!

If you shut off power to a Zigbee bulb it will show as “unavailable” in HA, and not quickly - in ZHA the default delay is two hours, and I believe it is something similar in Z2M. You can change this setting, but it’s never going to be quick.

Each individual bulb should have a start up behaviour setting dictating what it should do when power is restored. This will be something like “on”, “off”, “toggle” or “restore previous value”.

Zigbee is designed on the assumption that mains devices will always be powered, so that they can continue passing messages to others. If you turn them off the whole network will stop working pretty quickly.

2 Likes