Philips Hue changed to unavailable

Configuration
81

after having experienced this for almost 2 years now, had to conclude there’s no way to really solve it (from HA side), and we need to find a way to ‘deal’ with it.

Things I found that make Hue work as robust as can be:

try to make the instance as lean as possible, too much goings on frequently kick Hue out of connection. Notorious culprits in my settings are Rest sensors, and integrations/components that require (heavy) traffic at startup (eg Buienradar)
Every now and then adding an extra component immediately makes Hue suffer. I’ve come to see Hue more as a messenger of internal struggle than being a culprit itself.

Never has the Hue Custom component caused issues, nor have CC’s done so perse. The warning message we get using CC’s was added after a firm discussion about this… Not saying CC’s can’t interfere, I have eg always had issues with the custom cards updater (now deprecated), or the sensor authorized. Having a lot of template sensors can cause startup slowdown, which just might (can’t prove it) frustrate Hue initialization…

I have a 2nd ‘clean’ HA install, on which I test all new versions and other stuff. delete these after testing. Only keep Hue, Tradfri, Google cast on those (can’t switch off the endless discovery of those), and Darksky sensor, to create some sensors. It is rock solid. Hue never even blinks.

So, long story short, and what ever the cause may be, Hue signals internal traffic (would not say issues just yet…) and makes you need to review your setup carefully.

Yes, now and then I need 3 restarts for the lights to show up (after not having been initialized at startup at all), or they take 2 to 3 minutes to finally kick in. It’s a bummer.

And, unless a major revamp of the integration will be made possible if and when Hue dev’s finally decide to auto send changes instead of needing to be polled by HA, I fear we can do nothing else than ‘deal’ with it.

Will update soon to a Pi4 and hope the better specs relieve the HA instance of these sorrows…

update

just as a fyi: found another culprit for huge hue connection issues: the Airquality integration Opensensemap.
After having enabled that, constant errors in the logs about not being able to retrieve data for that component, while suffering the notorious Hue errors at the same time. Lag in the system, and lights showing unavailable. Taking it out again relieves the system at once, and lights are back in the frontend…

1 Like
82

Is this problem occuring on all platforms ie raspberry pi 3 etc? So not even change from Pi 3 -> 4 could resolve this or changing to totally different architecture? I know that even Pi 3 does have enough power to run everything but still just a thought that came up to me :slight_smile:

83

FYI. I have had no problems since replacing Hue hub with Conbee II and Deconz. Button presses on dimmers also trigger with no delay.

84

I’ve said previously… I updated my routers from orbi 30s to Orbi 50s and ever since then hue has been rock solid. I have no idea why but I have no drop outs and no random lights coming on…

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I’ve also never had this at all - and now its nearly every restart. Also 3b+ and .98…

86

Going mad over here. No one at HA has a solution for this?

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no.

not to make you feel good, but I had a rock steady Rpi4 4gb Hassio 99.x instance, and as of today I need 4 to 5 restarts to see the hue lights in the first place…
after that, the lights seem steady again.

Sometimes even adding a small sensor like the version sensor, or WebSocket (those were the changes I added, and now took out again) seem to make a difference.

88

I ended up moving my 10+ hue bulbs, strips, and remotes to my zigbee controller. Of course I already had zigbee up and running, so it was an easy experiment. (no cost involved. haha). I was definitely hesitant at first. But I took a step back and realized that I rarely used the hue app, I did have one third party hue app for some custom color scenes, but other than that, most of my control came from HA and from Alexa.

Since I’ve moved over, I could not be happier. All lights work, never go unavailable, and I dont have to use by hub anymore. I recreated my few hue scenes in HA, and even created a simple color loop automation, if I want to show off the color capabilities.

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I’ve been having similar issues as well, so I assume by your statement is that you can’t have a bulb connected to both the Zigbee dongle and the Hue Bridge at the same time … correct?

90

No, it’s one or the other. You do need a way to unpair them with the hub though. The Hue Remotes (which I also had), make it very easy to do so

91

I had this issue today and tracked it down to changing the name of the HA setup (under Configuration > General)

It then picked up my Hue bridge and was good to go - weird!

92

I’ve been having issues with hue for a while too now. I changed ISP recently and had problems handing out fixed ip’s trough dhcp. (the hue bridge would get the correct ip and when the lease time was over it would get a new ip but not the one i asked for) I since then moved the bridge out of my dhcp range and gave it a fixed ip trough the hue app and it now alwas has the same IP but… I have the same issue as you guys now. Almost all the time my hue lights are not accessible with home assistant. I’ve noticed that when i toggle lights on the hue app 80% of the time they are back in home assistant. I’ve also noticed that when i surf to the gateway ip of my router that on the overview page under ethernet i can see my hassio, but not always the hue bridge, if it’s not there it won’t work with hassio, if it is it will work. However, it always works on the hue app regardless of the previous statement.
So my conclusion thus far is that the hue bridge connection must go in some kind of sleep mode?
I’m desperate, with my previous ISP all worked perfectly as i could assign it a ip over dhcp. And it was always on the oview page of the router settings.
thanks !

93

There’s definitely (at least) two different issues here.

  1. Sporadic single lights or partial systems going unavailable
  2. the entire hue system (bridge) going unavailable.

I had issue number 2, upon boot the entire hue system was unavailable. The logs would say, ‘hue system taking longer than 10 seconds’. Unlike many of the posters here I run everything on copper , no wifi used (I have WiFi, but the only things that connect to it are some phones and ESP32(s). Also no zigbee (other than Hue).

I rebooted many times over multiple days, tried many, many different possible fixes, none of which worked. What finally fixed it for me was:

discovery:
  ignore:
    - philips_hue

I hope this helps some else.

94

Thank you. This fixed it for me.

95

Hi all,

I had the same probleme and I try to clean my hue hub (in hue application) and since do that I have no more hue unvailable lights.

I think hue hub doesn’t like a many 3rd party clients. I have just my homeassistant link to hue hub

I hope this will help you

96

Having problems number 1

Some lights keep appearing unavailable in HA
Although they are available in hue app

Any fix for this?
I cant use HA with hue like this, cause i get strange things

97

I’ve been looking for a solution for the hue bridge problem for over 6 months. Nothing I have tried or read made a difference. I tried to understand when this happens and how ofter but it is confusing as it’s really random. Sometimes it repeats every minute, some times every hour.

From what I have read so far, the most intersting data point is yours.
Yes! I am also using history data for my baby’s room.
Temperature and humidity.

Also used history data for wife’s washing machine.

Removed them both.
Will definetelly report back if this solve the problem.

98

Did this fix your unavailable issues? I have some outdoor spots that keep coming and going to unavailable. I use to have allow_unavailable set in the config but with the integration required in the UI, I dont think I can set that option.

99

hello,
Yes it did make a huge difference. After I applied the last update, currently I am on 0.1.402 and removing the history data it did calm down the unavailable issue a lot.

I still get it but now 2-3 times a day for a few seconds.

100

FWIW, I started suffering from these “Hue XXX changed to unavailable” log messages a few days ago, and I was getting a slew of them about every three or four minutes, with no stop. It wasn’t just the Hue integration either, my TP-Link switches were doing this too , although far less frequently. I noticed I wasn’t on the latest HassOS so I tried to update, and that failed. What I saw was the download stalled after about 12-14MB had been downloaded. I could download the image in a few seconds on a PC on the same network, so I connected my RPi3 via Ethernet and every single problem went away. For whatever reason, access to WiFi network was crawling on my RPi3, and caused all of my problems.