The demon light

I thought I’d tell the story of this frustrating problem so someone else might not have to relive this small but as I said frustrating ordeal.

I have a setup with deconz/hass and mostly IKEA lights. All worked well for over a year, except for one thing. The light in the kids room went haywire and started blinking/flickering around twice per second. It was not responding. It seemed to happen when it has been on for a while at full brightness. If I left it off for about half an hour it turned on fine. Now it was reset and needed to be re joined to the network. It worked mostly if it was not left on for hours and on low brightness.

I changed to a new bulb, same result. The bulb was somewhat hot and I assumed it overheated. Nothing was out of the ordinary zigbee-wise. The bulbs worked fine on other locations in the house. I finally gave up on IKEA bulbs thinking heat was the problem and bought a Osram color bulb. Tinkered with it in my office for some time, worked fine. Installed it in the kids room, 5 minutes later, same behavior, the bulb was cold. Now I had only two working theories:

  1. I had accidentally opened a portal to hell just around that area.
  2. I am haunted.

In a last ditch effort I changed out the whole lamp and screwed the bulb into a simple holder, now it works fine. I cannot find any bad electrical connections or anything in the IKEA children’s lamp that was installed in the ceiling. Very weird.