Third Reality ZL1 bulbs unstable after 2025.11.1 upgrade

[chris1young (Chris Young)]

Hi, I’m new here and new to HA. I use zigbee2MQTT and for my zigbee coordinator I’m using the SLZB-MR1 POE, which works great and allows me to put it in the middle of the house instead of where my HA server sits. LQI is well within acceptable ranges on all my devices.

I have four Third Reality ZL1 bulbs which I use for different automations. One automation turns the bulb on at sunset and uses the colorloop effect. This has worked without issue for weeks until I upgraded to 2025.11 or 2025.11.1, not sure which one broke things. Now the bulbs act unreliably. The colorloop effect will work for a few minutes once the automation has turned the bulb on but then it will stop changing and just rest on a single color. Sometimes I can’t control the bulb manually either. I’ve tried removing the bulb and re-adding it to HA a few times but the weird behavior always seems to return.

Is anyone else experiencing similar problems? I’m suspecting the HA update at this point. It also broke my Alexa media player integration. I spent a day trying to get it to connect but it always failed. Finally I googled it and the .11 update was the culprit. The next day an update to the Alexa media player integration came out and that fixed it but not before I spent many hours of frustration thinking it was something I was doing wrong.

[Rodrick]

@chris1young

Is anyone else experiencing similar problems?

Yes, for me, don’t know if this will work for you because I don’t know why it work for me, but I changed my automation “light turn on” to device, instead of entity. Previously all of my automations for the Third Reality bulb used “entity” because it was better at the time, now when I switched it to “device” and it works.

I’m not able to explain why as I have learned using Entity is better, but this has worked for me so far.

[chris1young (Chris Young)]

Thanks for the reply Rodrick. The only problem with using the device is that it doesn’t expose the “effect” parameter. I don’t know if the YAML can be edited to include that or not but I’m not a YAML expert. I may experiment with this however and see if I can set the bulbs default behavior to colorloop.

[Sir_Goodenough ((SG) WhatAreWeFixing.Today)]

@chris1young

The colorloop effect will work for a few minutes once the automation has turned the bulb on but then it will stop changing and just rest on a single color

Sounds like it rainbow’s thru once. This is the way all my stuff has ever worked. I’d say others agree because of these. Try one.

Color Loop Blueprint with Configurable Colors and Transition Time

I believe the following should work (I’m still fairly new to HA so there may be a better solution) When turned on: service - scene.create - Give it a name, choose your entities - Activate your color changes When turned off: deactivate color changes service - scene.apply - {your scene name}

OR

Party Lights - Randomly loop through color and brightness values

Get it now: [Open your Home Assistant instance and show the blueprint import dialog with a specific blueprint pre-filled.] Introduction: When ‘party mode’ is turned on, your lights will start looping through random color and brightness values, creating an ever changing atmosphere. How it works: Select your party mode trigger. ( Can be a switch or input_boolean entity. Once turned on the party mode will be activated) NOTE: If you don’t have a switch or boolean t…

[chris1young (Chris Young)]

thanks Sir_G, I’ll give these a try.

[chris1young (Chris Young)]

Just doing some preliminary testing with Party LIghts but so far it seems very promising. I’ll keep this automation running for a while and see if it craps out but so far so good. Thanks again.

[ShadowFist]

@chris1young

I’m suspecting the HA update at this point. It also broke my Alexa media player integration. I spent a day trying to get it to connect but it always failed. Finally I googled it and the .11 update was the culprit. The next day an update to the Alexa media player integration came out and that fixed it but not before I spent many hours of frustration thinking it was something I was doing wrong

Neither of your issues were caused by the 2025.11 update.

The colorloop being stuck on a single colour was reported in these forums a month ago. Can’t find the thread, but it was someone reporting their lights would get to purple & stop.

The Alexa issue was caused by Amazon themselves as reported in various threads here. Alexa Media Player isn’t even part of the HA update cycle since it’s a custom integration. That’s why they managed to roll out a fix so quickly.