So i’ve just spent the better part of a day trying to replace 4 Kasa KL125 bulbs with 4 Tapo L535E Matter over Wifi bulbs with very little success. Finally got them all in to HA, but the on response is abysmal, and sometimes would take up to 5 seconds to turn on. Turn off was fine, and as long as you turned it back on quickly the response was better, but not what I’d call acceptable. Turning off was almost instant, working perfectly fine.
They were all on the latest firmware (I updated all 4). I had the On transition set to 0.
The most problematic one was the bathroom. I have an esp8266 and a MMWave sensor wired up to send an MQTT message when there’s someone detected. It’s custom code, not ESPHome as I’ve had problems with the responsiveness of the latter. When i walk in and trigger the sensor, that light comes on almost instantly. step out, and once the sensor detects no occupation for a couple seconds, light goes out. Simple. Or so I thought…
Put the Matter bulb in, and now this automation (after updating with the new entity) takes almost 5 seconds to turn the light on. If you’re in a hurry, 5 seconds could be the difference between crapping oneself, and well, not crapping oneself, and not being able to see anything isn’t going to help that. No amount of screwing around with the settings in HA, firewall settings, wifi settings, etc seemed to fix this. I can see the MQTT message triggered almost instantly, and then HA takes it’s sweet time triggering the light. Even just using a toggle in on the dashboard had the same delay, so I know it’s not my sensor/MQTT.
I’ve already started a return on these things, but what I’m trying to figure out is if it’s simply a vendor issue, like maybe another brand might be better? Is this a problem with Matter over Wifi? The thing that started this was TP-Link’s FW update to the Kasa bulbs that’s made them rather flaky with HA as of late and I’ve been wanting local control for a while now. Matter over Wifi seemed to scratch that itch, but for now the Kasa bulbs are back in and working fine.
Any thoughts or discussion on this is welcome. I want to like these things, but with their lack of responsiveness they’re useless to me.