I went from deCONZ to ZHA. Now the IKEA bulbs aren't updating their status. How to properly report the issues?

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Hi all,

First of all, a big thanks to all you amazing people out there that create and maintain this fantastic product! I’ve been a satisfied user for over two years now. Before HA I used Domoticz, which works good, but is way more techy and less actively updated.

A few weeks ago, I ordered my second RPi4 and did a complete reinstall. With my previous RPi4 install, I started off on the wrong foot and wanted to correct it. It was also a nice opportunity to drop the SD card and boot from an USB SSD drive. This works great BTW as long as you use the 5.x 64bit version.
My first setup had a Conbee II stick, combined with deCONZ and it worked quite well. I made a few mistakes with names (damn you, OCD slight_smile:) but other than that, I liked it. I later learned that there was native support from HA for Zigbee in the form of ZHA. I read a lot of the forums, and decide to walk this path in my new setup. Mainly because I think that in the long run, this will provide the better experience. The open source nature of it, probably giving it also better support for a lot of device. So I bought another Conbee II stick for my ZHA setup and slowly migrated my devices from deCONZ to my new ZHA setup.

I must say that it works basically the same way as deCONZ, but the overall integration seems a bit better. I do have two issues with this setup and I can’t seem to find other references to it in the community. I do find one reference on Github, but honestly I don’t know if it is exactly my problem.

Issue 1:
The main issue I have is that with ZHA the status of my IKEA bulbs isn’t updated. When I turn them off and on with HA (or the IOS app), everything works fine. But when I change the state, no matter if it’s on, off, brightness or color, this isn’t reflected in HA. A lot of automations depend on the state of these bulbs. For now I can tell my wife to use the app, but this isn’t a long lasting solution. So, is this a know problem? If not, how do I report this issue? Or maybe more generic: what do I need to do with this issue?

Issue 2:
This one is way less important, but I’m just curious on how to properly report this. I’ve got two Xiaomi Aqara wall switches (double and single rocker) that work fine. But I’ve also got four YPHIX wall switches. Three on/off and one with about all the options.

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I can pair these with ZHA without problems and they appear as:
ZGRC-KEY-007 by Sunricher and ZGRC-KEY-009 by Sunricher.
The only thing that is reported to HA however, is the battery state. When I go to ‘Developer tools -> Events’ and listen to events, I see a lot of info when I press the buttons. But I don’t have a clue what to do with this info. I think I can manage to use an event in my automation (have to dive into that), although using predefined settings in the GUI would more sustainable.
But my main question is how and where to look for this support and what information to supply.

Just to be complete:
My setup is Supervisor version 243, HassOS 5.1 (64bit) and HA version 0.114.4

Thanks again for all the hard work and I hope my issues are clear.

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Tomorrow, I’m switching back to deCONZ. For the second time now, I lost about half my devices after a reboot. This time I needed to reboot because of the 115 update. I used deCONZ for approximately a year, and this never once happened. If every time I reboot, I need to walk around my house and pair everything again, I’ll pass.

My conclusion now is that ZHA isn’t production ready yet. Too bad, because I really like the way it integrates in HA.

Thanks for the great efforts you put into it. Maybe next year…

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I am on deCONZ and works fine (Raspberry Pi 3B).
Now I am building a new hub based on Raspberry Pi 4 and a new ConBee II, I want to have a double system I can switch in case of emergency.

While assembling the new system I wanted to try ZHA. I have paired Osram and Ikea bulbs, Sunricher dimmers, Aquara double button; all paired and working fine.

But before even thinking of switch my current setup I want to be sure about stability and started looking around. I found your experience interesting and recent, so I suppose nothing much has changed since then.

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Hi tizgal,

What you’re describing is exactly what I was thinking. A new setup, so I have a fallback in case of emergency. And at the same time, this is a great opportunity to start with the natively supported ZHA setup.

Well… I ran this setup for almost two weeks. In these two weeks I’ve lost half of my devices once and had to re-pair them. A few days later, I noticed that all my devices were offline. A HA reboot didn’t fix the problem. I had to turn off (that’s right, power off) and on the device for it to come back online.This was doable with two bulbs that could still be powered-off and on through a wall switch. But with my other devices, this wasn’t an option. I ended up blacking out my complete home…
At that moment I still had a little hope that these were just minor bugs. Or maybe I wanted it to work too much.
But after a required reboot due to the 115 update, half of my devices went missing again. I didn’t write all of them down, but it seemed that it was a mix of new and old devices that went offline the first time. This was it. I was done.

I formatted my ZHA setup and after about 4 - 6 hours, I was back with deCONZ. This is approx 3 1/2 weeks ago and I didn’t have any problems since then. Basically just like with my previous setup with deCONZ. For the record: I use exactly the same hardware as with ZHA. Same Raspberry and the same ConbeeII stick.

There is one minor issue though. My Sunricher switches (ZGRC-KEY-007 and ZGRC-KEY-009) don’t send a deCONZ event when a button is pushed. That way, some of my automations won’t work correctly.

BUT… I addressed these issues at the deCONZ github (https://github.com/dresden-elektronik/deconz-rest-plugin/issues/3396 and https://github.com/dresden-elektronik/deconz-rest-plugin/issues/3397), and in the next deCONZ release, this will be fixed. This means that within two releases (the add-on lags a bit behind apparently), my Sunricher switches will work too. I can live with that.

So, long story short. ZHA is most definitely promising, but not ready for production use. Not for me at least.

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Thanks for sharing your experience, it is very helpful to me.

I will stick to deCONZ for now, after all in case something goes wrong with HA I can still access deCONZ and control lights from there. But I will keep an eye on ZHA, I have a spare RPi 3+ left that I can use to experiment.