Hue lights setup & integration with HA - advices & best practices

Configuration
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Hardware setup:

I decided to go full apartment with Hue, lights are pretty nice, but I have some doubts to clarify.

Integration with HA seems to work pretty well, when you have to set the light state, color, or fixed brightness and as long as you don’t have too many lights in the area and you want to control the area. Then it feels like lights lag to set the states.

With both remote types, there is an option to control the brightness. I find it useful to have such remotes in every room and completely replace typical wall mounted switches with battery remotes. I used the Hue native integration to get both remote types exposed to the HA and I receive the events pretty well, as expected.

I’ve noticed the following:

  • If I set the room/zone in the Hue app, this becomes exposed to HA and I can simply select entity in HA and Hue does to bridge from entity to dedicated lights. This works relatively ok, but it has dependency on the Hue settings
  • If I try to assign all lamps in the HA rooms, and then try to set the automation for the room, as I understood, HA will one-by-one send the command. And this seems to be the bottleneck with brightness
  • When you use to rotation on the tap or brightness-up/down on the remote-switch, lights do not follow the selection very well.

For instance I set the automation to increase/decrease brightness by +-10% on every press, and if you press twice fast, in both cases trigger is detected in the HA, but light will not move twice, in most cases only first time. And in BEST case, it will move twice, but second move will have sometimes even 3 seconds delay - pretty annoying.

I’ve tried several blueprints mentioned in the community forum, which well detect triggers, but it seems that integration between HA and Hue isn’t working well when you have a brightness control and you send several events in the short time. Short time here being 1 per second. It feels like someone is filtering too many messages, or maybe HA does the control in a synchronous way and does not send all events because previous transition didn’t complete yet. Sometimes even happens that if you send too many of these events, light won’t respond to any other command for next cca 10 seconds.

Remote switch emits repeat event if you hold the button, and for which event I have a +-10% brightness adjustment. You can see how the light goes down, stops, goes down, stops, goes down, stops. There is no smoothness. Should I rather use down starts and down ends and while loop in the HA?

I’ve tried to set automation to restart but it didn’t feel there was any improvement, either.

Therefore questions:

  • Do you see similar phenomena with lights control issues?
  • Do you suggest to set scenes/rooms in the HA or shall I use Hue app to define scenes/rooms and use these entities in the HA instead?
  • Do you suggest to use HA to handle triggers of switches, or rather Hue natively, and use HA only as a global control with other sensors, where lights only go on/off?
  • Is it reliable to rely on Hue bridge long term to not “destroy” your scenes/rooms configuration?