I have a few Hue bulbs which are mostly fantastic, but there is one issue aside from the high price that I really dislike about these things and that is the idiotic default of reverting to full brightness warm white when power is applied. We have lots of big trees here so momentary power glitches are common, especially in the winter and it’s a real drag to be awakened in the middle of the night by blazing lights after every glitch. As a workaround I’ve put the bedroom lamp on a UPS but that seems a bit excessive. I gather there’s a way to set the default behavior of these lamps now but is it possible to do it manually without having the official bridge?
You say ‘idiotic default’, anyone who’s ever had their zigbee go down calls it ‘thank god I could still use my lights the old fashioned way as a fallback’.
Potato/potato.
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That is a very long story… but which integration do you use?
Why not just have a double or triple flip of the switch revert to manual mode? It could even be sticky until you do another double or triple flip of the switch. I maintain that powering on to full brightness white every time without a trivial way to change this behavior is an idiotic default that makes these lamps unusable in a bedroom and inconvenient in many other applications. There is absolutely no reason they couldn’t have made this configurable right from the start. It’s such an obvious use case, I would have raised hell about it if I’d been on the QA team way back when these were first being developed, not being able to select that behavior is a show-stopper bug.
Whatever the case, that’s beside the point. I know there’s a way to set the power-on default now, so I’d like to know if there’s any way to do that without using the official bridge. This is severely limiting my adoption of Hue bulbs, I’m not going to buy any more of them until I’ve figured out a way to stop them from popping on uncommanded every time the power blips
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Dunno, maybe it can’t keep count when you power it off 
All I’m saying is that you need to consider very carefully changing the default. As you say, engineers and design teams will have sat around for a while considering what was ‘best’ and they decided that for a reason, that’s why every single bulb no matter who the manufacturer is does the same thing.
If you change it and have the default to stay off when you restore power, then when your homeassistant goes pop or your zigbee dongle fries (possibly due to the same power problems you’re having), then you’re going to be without lighting until it’s fixed.
So, maybe for you changing the default is a good idea, maybe another option would be better? Possibly zigbee bulbs are not the best for your situation?
All I’m saying is to think about it carefully rather than in anger at 3am because the light came on 
Of course, if you do decide to do it, and you do want help to do so, you’re going to need to answer @sjee
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You seem to forget you can do this if you use the Hue bridge. It has nothing to do with the Hue bulbs themselfs but with whatever hub/integration you are using. Share this and we might be able to help.
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If home assistant goes down I’ll just use a one of the many non-zigbee lights, or swap in a different bulb, or use a flashlight, or light an oil lamp, or any number of other options. Popping on full brightness at random times is unacceptable to me, period, this is not up for debate. The last time we had a wind storm the lamp in the living room came on uncommanded 5 or 6 times before I finally yanked the plug out of the wall. If it works for other people that’s fine but it does not work for me, the wife is going to smash the thing if it comes on at night and wakes her up on a work night. I KNOW there is a way to change this behavior with Hue lamps, I do not know if it’s possible to do without the official bridge, so that’s what I’m looking for, not debate over whether this is the “best” way for it to be. The best way is for the individual to be able to choose for themselves how the device behaves in order for it to work best for them.
I’ve been on teams designing products and it has been my experience that a lot of products are designed to work a certain way because somebody comes up with a new idea for a product and then when it gets popular everyone else just copies the way the stuff everyone else is selling works. Often there is a big list of features they want to have but there is always a rush to get it out the door and never enough engineering resources. In other cases there are regulations created by some legislator who is clueless, or worries about litigation if some idiot figures out a way to hurt themselves and sue, or a thick headed product manager who can’t or won’t understand that there are use cases other than that which they have thought of. I’ve worked in software development, embedded and other engineering for over 20 years so I’ve seen all of this. Suffice to say the ability to set the default behavior was very heavily requested and Philips eventually added added it. Perhaps I just need to take my bulbs over to my friend’s place, pair them with his Hue bridge, set the default and then take them back home and pair with my system but I was hoping there was an easier way.
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OK, you’re obviously a very angry guy and you don’t actually want help finding a solution, you just want to have a rant.
Good luck with your future automating.
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Agree with @anon43302295 you clearly do not want help, just to share your frustration.
Maybe this is interresting for you; https://www.careers.signify.com/jobs/lead-development-engineer-shanghai-5/
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I’m not angry at all, I’m just a little frustrated, I didn’t mean to rant but it seems like this thread went something like this:
“Hey I’m looking for a way to do this, does anyone know of a way to do it without using an official hub?”
And the answer I got is along the lines of “What you want to do is wrong, you don’t really want to do that because reasons, maybe you should just use different lights”
I didn’t mean to come off as angry or confrontational but don’t you see how that could be frustrating, to ask if anyone knows how to do something and the only responses I get are people arguing I shouldn’t want to do that? And why the smartass response of sending me a job posting in China? I have a job already, I’m not seeking employment. If you don’t know or don’t want to tell me the answer to my question that’s fine, I know you guys aren’t my personal tech support and don’t owe me anything, but please don’t argue that I’m wrong for wanting to do it. If you can’t or don’t want to provide a helpful answer then why respond at all? I would very much appreciate help, people trying to argue that what I want to do is wrong is not help. Maybe I got off on the wrong foot, or maybe there’s just a different vibe here than the other technical forums I’m on, I don’t know. I didn’t intend to piss anyone off, I just asked a simple question.
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AFAIK is not possible without the hub. Phillips doesn’t publish their firmware to 3th party.
This is not true, it depends on the hub you are using.
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You’ve repeatedly used aggressive language and seen friendly advice as argumentative.
@sjee and I waited over an hour to find out what method you’re using to speak to the bulbs, but it never came.
I’m unsubscribing from this thread.
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You’ve been asked several times which hub/integration you are using. This is essential, without this information there is no way to explain if and how it can be done.
Instead of providing this information you start to rant about how things would have been different if you had been on the Hue QA team, your 20 years of enginering experience, etc. and you think posting a job opening is “smartass” response? It only shows your level of frustration is way higher as your sense of humor.
As @anon43302295 I’m out as well.
I’m sorry, I didn’t see those replies asking, for some reason I only got email notifications from some of the responses, I see several more replies that weren’t there when I last looked. I didn’t mean to be using angry language, emotion does not carry well over text and I’m somewhat autistic which doesn’t help either. Communicating can be a challenge under the best of circumstances and it’s even harder when I’m tired, late at night after a long week at work and frustrated from banging my head against a (unrelated) problem for hours making less progress than I’d hoped. I didn’t realize anyone was sitting around waiting for me to answer, I had to get up to do something else and was not at my PC and assumed this was an asynchronous medium and an immediate response not necessarily expected. I’m using a Sonoff zigbee bridge with Tasmota ZHA.
Regarding the Hue hub, the way it works is that with the bulb connected to the hub, the hub can update the firmware on the bulb OTA and also set certain parameters such as the default power-on behavior. Once it has been set it is persistent on the bulb so in theory I should be able to pair my bulbs to a hub, set the behavior and then un-pair them and have it keep working the way I want. I have several friends with real Hue hubs and they’re not particularly expensive so I can acquire one if need be, but if it was possible to just send the required commands using the hardware I have that would save me time, and it would save having another piece of hardware laying around that I only need for a single use. That’s fine though, as much as I wish everything were open, I can’t completely blame Philips for expecting people to use these bulbs with their hub.
In case anyone finds themselves in the same situation and just wants an answer, I figured out how to do this on my own and will share it here. It is not only possible, it’s trivial, at least with the 3rd gen Hue lamps, takes only a few minutes and doesn’t rely on the zigbee network at all so your configuration is irrelevant. Simply install the Hue bluetooth app on your mobile device, power cycle the bulb to put it in pairing mode and the app will find it. Then go to Settings> Power On Behavior and choose the setting you want. That’s it, easy, works great, gives me exactly what I wanted, and the zigbee connection is unaffected and still works just the way it did before. Happy wife, happy life, my only remaining gripe about Hue is the price but it is what it is, I haven’t found a cheaper lamp that performs as well. Hope this saves somebody some time and frustration.
Thanks @james_s - but are you sure that the ZHA connection is unaffected from the factory reset of the bulb? I’ve done with one of my LWT001 and after pairing it to hue bridge I can’t control the bulb from HA. Or what kind of “power cycle the bulb to put it in pairing mode” do you mean? Do you mean the 5 times power cycle?
I`ve tried it many times: I could only pair the lamp with one bridge: Philips Hue Bridge or ZHA - but I can´t get the both hubs working with one lamp. So I think I will pair all lamps with Philips Hue bridge and all sensors and switches with ZHA.
@sjee I´ve the same question and I’ve just migrated from Philips Hue Bridge to ZHA with CC2531 because of slow sensors and switches. Do you know if my current bridge ZHA could set the power loss recovery to bulbs?
Hi - I had the same issue as others have described… I couldn’t use the bluetooth to configure the power loss recovery setting and have the bulb remain on zigbee. Re-connecting to zigbee seemed to reset that power loss setting to default.
I just managed to get the bulb configured yesterday via ZHA to not come back on after a power outage - so thought I would post the solution here in case others come looking.
Steps:
- Navigate to the bulb device.
- Click the “Manage Clusters” setting
- Select “OnOff” in the Clusters dropdown
- Select the “start_up_on_off” attribute in the Attributes of the selected cluster dropdown
- If you want to see the current value, hit the Get Zigbee Attribute button.
- Enter in On or Off into the Value field. Then click the Set Zigbee Attribute button
- Confirm it’s now changed by again hitting the Get Zigbee Attribute button.
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