Been lurking in here a while, and was hoping to compare notes and expectations on my Zigbee configuration.
I currently use ZHA with Husbzb-1 for my coordinator. I have about 20 Thirdreality outlets as routers, and have 70 devices total. They’ve been working great, except for some end devices on a far end of my house. No biggie.
I have about 20 Hue bulbs joined to the Philips hub, integrated with HA. They’ve worked fine as well with the Philips hub. Though I decided to take the plunge and rid myself of the Philips hub altogether thinking joining more devices would make my entire network even snappier (with more routers in the mix). One by one, I simply deleted them from the Philips hub, joined them successfully to ZHA. It was so easy…but regrettably, it’s been a miserable experience as I came to realize.
Everything seemed to be working great, until I lost power for 30 seconds (windy/rainy day). That’s when I realized I had to re-pair each of the Hue bulbs one by one, and could only do it using the official Philips Switch (ladder needed on several of them). In some cases, it took a lot of retries/re-pairing to get them discovered, many hours wasted. The Hue bulbs don’t seem to recover on their own and join, compared to the Thirdreality routers I already have, other end devices that just magically rejoin by themselves. I left them on for days as an experiment, and none of them automatically recovered over HA/Husbzb-1 (they would on the Philips Hub).
I have the Skyconnect on order and was thinking maybe it’s the Husbzb-1 (well aware it’s an old). Maybe I hit the upper limit?
Anyway I wanted to ask if anyone has had similar issues with Hue bulbs not automatically coming back online on any other coordinators and if that’s just the norm.
40 router devices is pushing the limit for the HUSBZB-1. IIRC, it can only really handle about 25-30 child devices before it starts having issues.
The Skyconnect should be able to handle more router devices (I think(?) up to 50). Most likely what’s happening is that the Hue bulbs are trying to route back to the coordinator and failing due to device limits in the coordinator itself. Basically, the HUSBZB-1 is trying to accept all the routers and failing at it miserably.
With that said, I have about 14 Hue bulbs still on my mesh and they are, without a doubt, the strongest devices in terms of connection and reliability.
Rssi improved immediately. I was able to add more Hue bulbs, but I did move some routers around to harder to reach places.
My coordinator is in the basement (middle of the house, usb extension cord), and I am struggling to get Hue bulbs to connect on the 2nd floor Master Bedroom despite having 20 routers on the 1st floor (with a bunch scattered heavily on the floor below it).
Depending on the material in your floors (cement, wood, etc), I’m willing to bet that you just don’t have enough signal strength to make it to the routers on your first floor. You could try to remove the bulbs, pair them near a router on the first floor and then put them back in place and watch the LQI on them. If it’s low, you might have to think about getting a high powered router for your second floor (Tubes, Zigstar, Sonoff flashed with router firmware, etc). With one of these, you can effectively boost the signal to make it through. However, once paired, even if they have a LQI of less than 40, you still might be able to keep the connection up. You’ll also want at least a couple of routers on your second floor. Don’t rely on the Hue bulbs to be your only routers. They’re good, but sometimes they do suck as routers (especially if they are the older bulbs).