Hue app shows everything online and normal, but home assistant keeps doing this
All I’ve found so far is a post from 2018 with comments until 2021 of people reporting/complaining about the same issue, but no concrete solution.
Is this still happening to people? Any thoughts on what I can do to try and stop it?
It’s not happening to me, but it was a couple of years ago. I cant’t remember what changed. What zigbee hub are you using? I have a Conbee II on an USB extension cable to get it away from interference, which is a common problem.
I’m using the combo zwave/ZigBee USB stick, husbzb-1 or whatever it’s called. I’ll try an extension cable, but isn’t the hue integration actually connecting through the hub/internet? Or is it making a local ZigBee connection between the hue hub and home assistant?
Given it’s a USB stick, interference can be a problem, so it’s an easy thing to try. The app connects to the hub, but if the bulb can’t connect to the hub for 10 seconds every 15 minutes, it can be hard to pick up in the app, but is obvious in the HA history.
Have you paired your bulbs to the zwave/Zigbee stick and use them natively in HA or are they paired to a Hue-Bridge and you are only using the hue-integration within HA?
If you are using the Hue-Bridge in parallel to the zwave/Zigbee stick in HA, have you made sure they are on different Zigbee channels and also not overlapping with the 2.4GHz WiFi spectrum used?
I have not checked the spectrums yet, but yes I am currently still using the Hue bridge. I am doing that because I read somewhere (I think in the Hue integration docs?) that Scenes in Home Assistant don’t work as well as Hue Scenes run from the Hue Bridge directly because Home Assistant will turn each bulb on/change its color individually vs Hue Bridge which will do them all simultaneously.
Is this an accurate assessment of the differences? Because I’d love to not have an extra bridge in my setup if I could instead just connect directly to the bulbs via my Zigbee stick (although I won’t enjoy crawling through the bushes to put them in pairing mode 
)
No, that’s not really accurate. What you describe is a HA entity group vs a Hue/Zigbee light group but if you pair your bulbs to your HA Zigbee stack you can create the light groups there too (and switch them all on/off with one command to the group instead of one to each entity separately).
As for the scenes: You can create scenes in HA too. The Hue integration brings all your hue-scenes into HA where you can easily check the details and recreate them within HA once you‘ve re-paired the bulbs over to the HA stack.
Don’t get me wrong there’s nothing against running your lights the way you do but in that case you should take special care of the channels in use (Hue Zigbee vs HA Zigbee but also vs the 2.4GHz channel in use around).
If both your Hue bridge and your HA-Zigbee-stick run on Zigbee channel 11 that would lead to trouble. If your WiFi 2.4 then additionally used channel 1 you’d be lost…
Here is a good reference article
