Three weeks ago I’ve moved all my devices from the hue and aqara hubs to ZHA and the range and reaction time of all devices have been greatly improved!
However, the behavior of Hue lights in ZHA is giving me lots of problems in daily use since then, causing me to want to go back to the old situation. I’m hoping there is a solution for the problems I’m experiencing, since these feel like basic things that should just work with any zigbee integration.
Grouped devices are not all turning on or off;
I’ve got about 12 hue lights outside, divided into two light groups. When turning on a group, a random number of lights turn on, or all of them turn on but only half of them update their status. I’ve tried creating a zigbee group for these lights, but I’m unable to add all the lights to a group. Every time a different light refuses to be added to the group, without any status message.
Status changes are way too slow. Even after the latest update which introduced the polling behavior.
I’ve got two hue lights and a motion sensor on my stairs. If I walk past the sensor, both lights are turned on. When the sensor untrips after two minutes, both lights turn off. This is working. However, home assistant sometimes thinks one of the lights is still on, causing the group to be as ‘on’ as well, so if motion is detected within the next few minutes, the light won’t turn on again. This happens with light groups and zigbee groups.
Im using Hue lights in ZHA i use the light group not zigbee groups i got 3 light in one group 99% of the time they work fine.
Zigbee groups work for me but as youve said because of the polling is set to 5 minutes they dont work right as once the group is switched on it switches itself back off thinking all the light are still off. I’d have thought this could be fixed with software as it knows what lights are in that group so it should update all status to on.
ZHA is a bit up and down most of the time it works flawlessly but lately i keep getting little issues here and there which irritates me now ive got a ikea blind was working fine but now when you first try to do anything with it there is a massive delay before it starts doing anything, before was instant.
Even the 5 minutes polling thing doesn’t seem to fix all of my problems.
Take for example my garden lights; 6 lights in a HA light group (not a ZHA group yet), which are turned on at sunset, and turned off at sunrise. One single light.turn_on or _off command to the group, no other commands in between.
This morning, only a single light turned off, the rest of them is still on and had to be turned off manually. But if I turn off the light group, it just jumps back on and only one of the 5 lights in the group went from on to off. Now I have to wait for up to 5 minutes to see which lights did actually turn off.
Have more and more issues now I have 2 groups of 2 lights and an other light on its own in each room so 3 lights in 2 rooms.
Turning them on and off sometimes 1 light out of the three will stay on when turned off etc really annoying was pretty stable before working 99% of the time now I’d say this is down to 70%
Exactly the same case over here; some lights and groups always work and then they just don’t for about a week, before returning to normal behavior, but everything that is triggered by a motion detector and needs to turn on and off in a minute or two behaves quite flakey unfortunately.
@duncank did you manage to resolve your issues? I’m facing the same problem - over 30 hue lights added through ZHA integration and HA struggles to update state properly. That makes it pretty unusable for me, same with HomeKit integration
Unfortunately not; most lights however do work for me, I guess because they don’t switch on or off very often (just once or twice a day, and they stay on for a longer period of time).
Only lights that I turn on or off more often (manually or via an automation) keep giving me problems, and that is especially noticeable during these darker days. Switches that toggle lights often need to be flipped twice because HA thinks the light was still on when it was actually off etc, very frustrating.
I’m wondering if a switch to Zigbee2MQTT or Deconz will change this behaviour, but I’m not looking forward to moving everything over just to find out.
Thanks, I do not physically turn off lights, they’re on all the time but HA still doesn’t always update their statuses. I can live with that but that causes headaches to the rest of my family.
With Deconz I can confirm everything works fine without issues, the only reason I switched to ZHA was direct switch binding to lights which is currently missing in Deconz.
Due to the issue with ZHA I’m again considering going back either to Deconz or hue hub. Guess this will be my last time, need a reliable solution rather than a home lab
Yeah I’m not physically turning off lights either; there’s a built in wall switch that communicates to HA to turn the lights on and off.
Thanks for confirming this works as expected with Deconz, I’m going to buy an extra Zigbee stick to move over my devices one by one instead of all at once, just to try things out; see how it works.
Too bad this isn’t looked in to more; you would say that a lot of people should be having these problems, since Hue is so widely available.
Haha, you’re not making it an easier choice to make
Did you have to power cycle the Hue lights to get them working at all, or to improve their behaviour?
And can you elaborate a bit more on the Deconz nightmare you experienced?
I started with Deconz over 18 months ago. It was very stable until about eight months ago where after one of the HA updates it just went mental with devices dropping off the network continually. After two months with no improvement I tried out ZHA and liked it except that it only supports HA1.2 and so you miss out on features from devices that are zigbee3.0.
Unfortunately it seems like the guys behind ZHA seem to think that people just want the very basics and so don’t add all clusters in the standards. The other thing is every time you reboot HA the zigbee network has to reconverge.
I tried Deconz for about five weeks recently and it was worse than ever. I have around 150 devices so when things keep dropping off the network it takes a huge amount of time to reinstate them. Again the responses I received were mainly it’s interference. I knew it wasn’t because I am a RF engineer and I don’t have the same issue using the same Conbee II device in ZHA.
So the long and the short of it is I am back on ZHA. The other good thing about ZHA over Deconz is that if a device only has the clusters supported in ZHA and follows the standard, they work out of the box. With Deconz every new device has to be coded into Deconz.
If only we could get ZHA upgraded with additional clusters and pulled out of the core it would be brilliant.
As I mentioned with many of my hue lights I have to power cycle them after rebooting HA. I reckon it has something to do with neighbour and child relationships not surviving the reboot however I cannot get a qualified response from anyone.
Saying all that, it is an open source product which is actively being developed and if your patient enough things get fixed.
Thanks for your reply, the fact that you can’t trust on devices just working reliable is too bad.
Did you ever try Zigbee2Mqtt? I’ve never tried it, but I’ve got a feeling that it is an active community so maybe the have these kind of bugs filtered out already. They also have support for the Conbee sticks now.
ZHA is super easy to setup and maintain, and that creates some hesitation for me to switch to something else, but it is getting more likely every day.
Had similar experience with deconz. Moved to Zigbee2mqtt now and it works very very well, no issues since months.
I would never use ZHA, as I think it’s a Bad idea To have one piece of software carry out all the tasks. It’s a friggin monolith.
The decoupling of HA as a UI from Zigbee2mqtt as the adapter via MQTT is exactly how I would tackle integration topics at work.
I agree with you to a point. If the devices were native MQTT yes, I just don’t like the adapter from Zigbee to MQTT. I just wish they would separate ZHA from the core.
that would adress my main concern, yes.
still a decoupling / messaging layer makes for a more robust architecture and it allows me to do everything nicely from NodeRed and a few python scripts I have running on a few Pis -> they all can do all their stuff with MQTT (zwave, zigbee, 433mhz…)
Now that OZW is there it would make sense that ZHA follows that pattern.
Hi all, I have 13 Gu10 Zigbee RGB bulbs in my ceiling.
First Probleme: Home Assistant Light Bulbs, are completly a mess.
Some bulbs turn on others not, and instead of all lights up at the same time togheter, not, they lights up one by one randonmly, and some of then dont even light up…
Second Probeme: I did manage to get all the 13 bulbs in a ZHA Group, ok thats work fine, they all light up togheter at the same time…but with a caviar. I toggle on the bulbs and I need to wait 3 seconds for bulbs response, same for turn off…WHAT?!
If i light up one by one myself, the response is fast, now if I have a group of 13 in zha…OMG…Horrendous, changing collors, changing light temperature…3 seconds of waiting
Bwt, i’m using SZB for zha, in the same division without wifi messing up
Well, I guess this thread answers whether or not I should start looking for other options than Hue hubs - we have 3, probably with 120-130 lights, basically every light bar 1 or 2 is hue.
The thought of a Hue bridge failure gives me sleepless nights, but at the same time (touch wood) everything works pretty much flawlessly for me/us.
I feel like I might solve/gain the ability to replace a ‘bridge’, but create a whole heap of other day to day issues - the lights not turning on as groups would drive me up the wall within hours.
I have problems with this myself. Just installed a fresh version of HA and used the same Conbee 2 stick that had run on Deconz before. Found all the lights and adding them was easy but for light groups made in HA some lights do turn off and other stay on…
