Philips Hue Switch Delay

I am a recent adopter of Home Assistant and am dramatically pleased with everything it does! To be able to finally control all of my lights with my Philips Hue switches has been such a relief. My only problem is the delay in response. I’ve researched this topic for a week but I can’t seem to figure out how to resolve the issue. I know the delay is due to local polling and not being set to local push, but I have no idea where to set that. Supposedly, the latest version of HA should have this enabled by default, but I still get a 1-3 second delay. I’ve read about Zigbee sticks and all kinds of information I am blissfully ignorant of, but I can’t make heads or tails of it. Normally, I hate posting questions because I feel like I can research my way out of posting, but I’m at my wits end. Can anyone please help me? Keep in mind, I’m a complete novice to Linux. Thank you.

Hello! I would like to bump this topic because I have the same issue. Philips Hue Integration documentation states that this integration uses Local Push, but I can see that this is invalid.

When I listen for hue_event in NodeRED I can obviously see that it is actually using polling because dimmer switch events arrive 1 per second and many are dropped. If I have the dimmer switch connected to deCONZ, which is actually using Local Push, every button press arrives instantly and none are dropped.

Is this a documentation issue or integration issue?

The current implementation of the Philips Hue integration apparently uses polling and local push. The next version will employ the new API from Philips and so it will be fully local push.

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This is all super new to me like with the OP. I’ve been searching this for a chunk of time and I could’ve sworn 2021.06 was released with push, though I guess you’re saying it doesn’t always?

And that this next update will always use push? I’ve looked at your link but I can’t tell what sort of time frame for getting this update there is. Would like to know as there’s not much point me turning on any automations for Hue devices till this is resolved.

Thank you!

Looking at the docs of the 2021.12 update and the pull requests on git, this update is finally out. I was looking forward to try it out, but it seems it is still using local polling for hue_events. I tested with hue dimmer and I can still get only 1 event per second with all events in between being dropped. So double-pressing the button will drop the second press.

Edit: It is the Hue API that is limited to 1 event per second. Quoting the Hue developer guide:

There is a 1 second rate limit on the amount of event containers the Bridge will send. If the same property has changed twice within that timeframe, you only get the last state. If multiple resources have changed within that timeframe, then you will get multiple events grouped in a single container.

So, if you want to use Hue dimmers and switches with Home Assistant, connect them to deCONZ or Zigbee2Mqtt device.

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Hi there! I hope that someone still sees this, even though the post is this old. I still have issues with hue dimmer buttons when used through the hue integration. I understand that the integration used to use polling to receive state changes, but that isnt the case anymore, is it? My hue dimmers react instantly when configuring them within the hue app. But as soon as I use them in automations in haos, I get a delay of about 1 second. Not as bad as the 5 seconds (in the old integration) but still… thats not as it should be, right?

Hi Josh. There is no polling to receive state anymore. Hue bridge pushes the state change to HASS. However, Hue bridge is rate limited to 1 state change per device per second. This makes it impossible to use Hue dimmers correctly in Home Assistant through Hue bridge.
E.g. holding a dimmer button triggers an event every 0.8 seconds which means some events will be dropped with bridge’s 1 second rate limit.

So, if you want to use hue dimmer buttons in Home Assistant, you should use other methods of connecting them to it such as deCONZ or Zigbee2Mqtt.

Edit: Definitely recommending Zigbee2Mqtt over deCONZ because the former even has firmware updates for Hue devices with minimal delay after they are available over Hue bridge.

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