I have a few automatons for my Hue lights. Sometimes they do what they are programmed to, while other times they don’t (turn on, correct brightness). If I were to use the Hue App, I never have this issue.
This automation turns the garage light on when I get home. Some of the time, the light does not get to 100% brightness and is super dim, other times it works.
- alias: Turn Garage Light On
initial_state: true
trigger:
- platform: state
entity_id: person.me
from: 'not_home'
to: 'home'
condition:
- condition: or
conditions:
- condition: sun
after: sunset
- condition: sun
before: sunrise
action:
- service: light.turn_on
data:
rgb_color: [255,207,120]
brightness_pct: 100
entity_id:
- light.garage
This automation occupationally misses one of the cabinet lights and it does not turn on. This happened this morning, and according to the history, the light was not unavailable.
I’ve had this problem before as well and the reason was that the Hue hub throttled incoming traffic from HA. The way I got around it was to use Hue groups/zones instead of making calls to individual lights. So, instead of calling 3 lights, call 1 group. The other thing is that brightness_pct has always been flaky for me when dealing with Hue. I use brightness instead and set it to 255 for max brightness.
When I setup my Hue Bridge a long time ago, I created rooms which are identified in HA as light.<room_name>. Would you use those or would you create your own group in Home Assistant such as group.<room_name>
If you aren’t planning on mixing in other lights besides the Hues, I would just stick with light.*, but if you are going to mix-n-match, groups would be better. I mix and match my Zigbee lights hosted by HA along with my Hues, so I typically use groups and scenes for everything.
I’m dealing with the same issue. My front porch lights dim to 1% at midnight, go off at sunrise, and then at sunset are supposed to turn on at 80%. Sometimes they do, sometimes they turn on but only at 1%. I’m calling light.front_porch, a Hue group of 2 porch lights.
The same thing is happening in my son’s bedroom, where the light was 1% when it turned off overnight, and turns back on in the morning…sometimes at 100% as expected, sometimes at 1%. This time I’m calling an individual light. I don’t know why…
I’m using brightness (not brightness_pct) for both.
@rockon83 are you using Hue Hub to connect your lights to HA?
I used to get this a lot, not just with HA, but also SmartThings and Hubitat. In fact, it happened every 2 in 3 times when turning kitchen light strips on. Hue hub is just getting flooded and takes the turn on command but not the command to go to the set level you want.
The only sure way of this becoming a thing of the past is to switch to a new zigbee stick. I’m on a Deconz Conbee 2 and have never seen the problem since
@MontyRisk I guess it depends on the use case. You have a potential window of 15 seconds without light at the right level. If the lights are for example in a hall way, 15 seconds could be far to slow to react to what you need. If its an outdoor light as in your example, 15 seconds delay isn’t such a biggie.
If its time critical for light to be on, then taking Hue off the hub to another zibgee service is definitely the way forward
@Townsmcp: Thanks! Yes, I am using the Hue hub. Any thoughts on why it would be getting flooded? Anything I can check to confirm or change to correct this?
@MontyRisk: I think I will try this. It doesn’t seem like the optimal solution, but if the brightness works most of the time, repeating it will increase the % of getting it right eventually to @MontyRisk’s point, not a big deal if this kicks off 15 seconds later in my use case, but ultimately seems like a permanent band aid rather than healing.
@rockon83 I spent 6 months looking into it but could only find that it was due to the hub protecting itself by not allow to many calls to be performed outside of itself
@Townsmcp - Upon my research, I presume you’re correct about the Hue Hub protecting itself. I have had the same issue whether or not I’ve used a Hue Group with a HA automation or a custom light group with several Hue lights in it through Home Assistant.
I took all of my Hue Groups and gave them a prefix, that way in HA, I can determine what is a custom group, vs a Hue group.
@rockon83 My issue was with outdoor lights not reaching the right brightness even though they are just a few feet from the hub.
In the example I gave, it will execute the turn on script 1 time every 5 seconds for 3 times. You can adjust this as you see fit.
If light.front_porch is a Hue group made in the app, it makes one call, if it is a custom group with two lights, Hue interprets the turn on event as two separate calls.
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