I have about 25 Philips Hue 60W and 75W White Ambient bulbs around the house, all intergrated through ZHA, most of which are also directly bound to one of several Inovelli Blue 2-in-1 switches. Everything is working well except that when there’s a power outage at the house all of the bulbs disconnect from the ZHA network AND the Inovelli switches, causing them to be uncontrollable. Not great when the power flickers at 2am.
The goal here is to have the bulbs stay off after power resumes (I can set this in ZHA), then get everything to sync back up after the bulbs reconnect to the network.
Here’s my setup:
Optiplex running Proxmox with HOAS in a VM.
ZHA Sonoff Dongle-E (Dongle-P arriving Monday for Z2M).
Roughly Zigbee 85 devices.
Philips Hue bulbs.
Inovelli Blue 2-in-1 switches.
Located in the US.
Some of the bulbs will eventually make their way back to the ZHA network and switches, but only about 30% will come back. The rest remain powered on and uncontrollable. The only correlation I can find is that ~70% of the bulbs that eventually came back on their own were powered directly off mains, while ~70% of the bulbs that never came back were powered via the Smart Bulb mode in the Inovelli swtiches. The only fix is to re-pair the bulbs, which works until the next outage. We get brownouts and blackouts a lot in this area, so the house is on a whole home surge protector.
Here’s the steps I’ve taken:
Confirmed same behavior when flipping a breaker and simply unscrewing a bulb.
Re-pair bulbs in various areas of the house via different devices, as well as directly from the coordinator.
change the “Start-up behavior” setting to “PreviousValue”. This still turns the bulbs on when power returns, just usually at a dim setting. They still won’t reconnect on their own. Under normal circumstances I’ll set this to “Off” and let the bulbs reconnect on their own.
New coordinator (Sonoff 3.0 Dongle-E).
Set 2.4ghz wifi to channel 11 to help with interference.
Switch to Z2M (Sonoff Dongle-P in the mail, will be here Monday).
I’ve downloaded full backups and I’m ready to attempt to recreate the ZHA network. Just wanted to stop by here first and see if y’all had any other recommendations. Thanks!
I’ve moved away from ZHA to Zigbee2MQTT for a number of reasons and recommend that to you. Specifically here, the ability to update device firmware.
However, the specific point here with your setup. Are you able to check the Inovelli firmware versions in ZHA and upgrade them? They have had a number of firmware fixes since these devices were released. Review the firmware change notes at the Inovelli discussion groups.
Another point regarding the Inovelli switches, I found they required bypass capacitors when they were attached in circuit with smart bulbs (no neutral setup), or the switches acted really wonky.
Good questions, I forgot to mention that in the original post. All switches are running Version 2.15. I’ve tried both LED Scaling Modes, though I think that only makes a difference with Smart Bulb Mode off. No change either way.
I’m curious if something to do with the way the switches send power to the lights is messing things up for the bulbs, though I have no confirmation of that. I’ll dig into their forum some more.
I forgot to say Welcome! and that I have found my various Hue bulbs of various versions all the way since their first bulb to be some of the most reliable zigbee router devices on my various zigbee networks, whether Hue, Smarthings, ZHA or Zigbee2MQTT. This from aspects of ‘just working’ as a light bulb or being a router for other zigbee devices.
Thanks! I agree, I’ve only recently switched over to Hue and absolutely love them out side of this one flaw. Have you experienced this disconnecting problem I’m having?
No, I’ve not seen what you have described in any of my setups over time. Other vendors bulbs doing odd things in some setups, yes, but never hue.
If you move over to Zigbee2MQTT, I would do some ‘point in time’ snapshots of the map function as you power cycle both Hue bulb and Inovelli switches. Watch how, the devices ‘re-route’ as the mesh reconfigures for disappearing and appearing routers. Unfortunately, being able to get a good view of these ‘reconfigures’ as mesh changes is a very weak point of Zigbee IMHO, no good tools to see how this changes over time and as devices change. You have to just do manual ‘starts’ of Zigbee map and take pictures of the changes, grab a and noodle on it. Back to my soapbox on ZHA vs. Zigbee2MQTT, I would not bother with the Map in ZHA, not useful. Did write some stuff wayback to try and look at ZHA, but not sure if it is valid. Link below:
I’m having a similar problem with my Sengled Zigbee bulbs. Whenever my coordinator resets (code upgrades, HA restarts etc.), I have to power cycle the bulbs to regain control. Note: this is not a new issue and has been happening for some time.
Configuration:
RPi4-64 4GB
Core - currently 2023.12.1
Supervisor 2023.11.6
Operation System 11.2
Frontend 20231206.0
ZHA
Sonoff 3.0 USB - CC2652 Firmware: Z-Stack 20210708
Zigbee E11-G13 bulbs
It may be worth mentioning that I also have trouble getting Zigbee routers to work, I have one of Tube’s routers as well as a Sonoff S40Lite. They appear in the visualization without a connecting line and as devices connect to them, device connectivity is lost.
