Me, and some others are experiencing slow response time when using HA automations with Tradfri light bulbs.
I want to share my experiences and the things I’ve tried (unsuccessfully unfortunately).
In the hope finding someone for a fix.
I have a hallway with 5 Ikea Tradfri lightbulbs and two Philips Hue motions sensors.
At first I was using i was using the philips hue app to turn on the lights when there was any movement in my hallway, all worked fine, quick response (within the second).
The only downside of Hue is the lack of customizations; hence Home assistant.
So i created (multiple to troubleshoot) automations to turn on the lights in my hallway when there is motion detected (or the binary sensor changed to on) on one of the two hue sensors.
The response time with this automation at best is 4-5 seconds, at worst 24-27 seconds.
At this point the all the devices where connected to the hue hub.
I’ve bought a Conbee II stick, unfortunately exactly the same result.
Connected all the tradfri lights to it; Hue still to Hue --> same
Connected all the devices (lights and sensors. --> same
Turned down the hue bridge, so only using the conbee --> same
After I just bought an Ikea tradfri hub or bridge and tried many different combinations (as seen above).
I come to the following conclusion, when ever home assistant is in between, the response time is slow.
I’ve switched back to just using Hue for the motion sensor. But i would realy like to get this fix or improved.
hopefully anyone has some ideas or fixes (or stop using tradri lights ? )
The problems you’re experiencing are unfortunately based on the way you use these devices. But don’t worry, you’re not the first.
Whenever you put a proprietary hub inbetween, you will have slow response times, especially with the HUE integration, as the motion sensors report to the hub, but the hub doesn’t publish this information, it has to be polled. That means, HA is asking the HUE hub every few seconds for “news” of the motion sensor(s). This is time consuming and it will put some load on your network.
What I’d do is this:
don’t use any hubs It’s not necessary (in your case, not always). I don’t mean “don’t use them for this”, don’t use them at all, they will pollute your network.
connect all your devices with a Zigbee extension directly to HA (ZHA, Zigbee2MQTT). That’s what the Conbee dongle is for.
If you pair your devices (the bulbs and the motion sensors) directly with HA, it will speed up the response times.
But, and that’s just an assumption, if you have a lot of devices and things to control, the hardware running your HA instance is getting slower. That means, with a growing number of devices and things to control, you will have to adapt your hardware.
If you’d share some more information about your system (hardware, number of devices to connect, what else is running there…), that would be helpful to answer your question more in depth.
To be correctly: the hue hub only allow a status update request every 20sec with the api. Thats the problem. And thats the point you have to connect hue sensors and switches to ZHA or similar if you want faster response.
I was scepticall at first but decided to give it another try, Removed all devices from the Hue hub, deleten the integration etc. And connected my hallway and so on to the conbee stick, and what do you know --> it works fine at the moment.
So thank you guys !!
Sometimes the solutions are right in front of you
)
