Problems pairing new Hue/Garnia lights with Z2M

Configuration Zigbee
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I have a house full of cheap Zigbee devices that have mostly coexisted pretty happily running off a single Zigbee2mqtt. I’m at the point where those cheap Zigbee downlights I bought 3+ years ago are starting to fail one by one, so I’ve been needing to get replacements.

Given how highly regarded Philips Hue are, I bought a half-dozen of them to replace the cheap ones failing, but I’ve been having difficulties pairing them.

When I go into pairing mode, the Hue bulb will pair pretty quickly, but then between 12 and 18 seconds the device drops off the Zigbee network entirely. And a short while later it will reappear. If I’m quick enough to rename it, it will reappear with the new name - but then will drop off again (and this isn’t offline - it’s not shown in the Devices list at all).

I’ve tried pairing to specific points (Coordinator, Router, other nearby lights), I’ve tried the factory reset/re-pair mode, I’ve updated firmware from the phone app over bluetooth, I’ve tried turning off most of my other Zigbee mains-powered devices, but it just doesn’t want to stick - until it eventually does.

The first light took a good few hours of fiddling around before just once, it stuck and didn’t unpair. The second I gave up and tried again the next day, and eventually got it to pair and be stable.

Now I’m trying #3 and I’m running into the same pairing problem again with it constantly leaving the network about 15 secs after joining…

Any ideas what’s going on and how I can make the initial pairing more reliable?

I’m using Zigbee2MQTT 2.7.2-1 on a HA Yellow with a Sonoff Zigbee 3.0 USB Dongle Plus (ZBDongle-P / CC2652P) with the latest firmware. I have another Sonoff stick as a Router, plus ~70 devices, about 2/5 being mains-powered router-capable.

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By highly regarded, do you mean the marketing is great? I won’t own one, too finicky for me.

Do you mean the zigbee ones that they are abandoning now that they are switching to Matter/Thread in their main lines because they have better control over those?

I wish you luck. I don’t have any advice other that don’t buy any more of them.

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Yes. I too avoided them for many years writing them off as overpriced name-brand products. I also held off as these ones are bluetooth as well, so I had my concerns as to their integration with a zigbee mesh.

And yet every other brand I’ve tried has had problems or started to fail after a few years. More recent threads across several home assistant/automation forums do skew towards people recommending Philips Hue for reliability.

They’re also the only recessed light I’ve seen that can actually do low light levels, and a smooth fade-in rather than a bright pop-in once the LED voltage threshold has been exceeded.

I don’t care that there’s a new line of Matter/Thread ones coming - that seems to be the thing for years now. I just need Zigbee ones that work now with my current network, so decided to take a punt on getting 6 (which is a small slice of my total zigbee lights).