Point is that you could solve this in a much better and more economical way, but sure, you do what you want. Be aware of the upcoming cloud account dependency also.
If you havent committed to this idea i would very much urge you to reconsider, i went all out Hue in my house and over 4 years ive gotten to 85 light points and 14 switches over 2 bridges. As much as i love the Hue bulbs, multihub hue truly sucks, if i want to add a new spot rack i will need a new hub, but then that hub wont have a zigbee mesh, so either i will need to put that hub close to the bulb, or i will need to reassign a group of lights to the new hub to reach it… Allso, there is no native way to interconnect switches, so if you want one switch at the front door to turn off all lights by long press? Nope says hue. Second, unless you keep a very strict zoning on all new additions your setup will be a mess. Connect the wrong bulb in the wrong hub, and you cant have a zone with the lights. Youll be operating with a minimum of 40 devices on each hub, which allows you to add 5 more devices on each hub before your system starts to grind to a halt. The hue app allso sucks with multihub, so you will need to use a companion app such as iconnecthue which is a LOT better, BUT if you have Iphone and your wife has an Android you will need a separate companion app for her such as Hue and Me to keep up the WAF. So honestly, i wish i went for smart switches and dumb bulbs, and a few smart bulbs where the smart switches couldnt reach. that would have been a LOT more future proof and expandable.
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I am going with a hybrid solution in my 2 houses. One house is already full HUE (3 bridges), on the second one I am starting the move. The second house is bigger, roughly 300-350 light bulbs to control. I lovet he hue app and all the dynamic light scenes, something I haven’t been able to get in HA. I don’t want to simply only change colour, I want more.
I divided the house into areas within reach of one hue bridge. Paired the lights and remote controls for that area with one hue bridge so the controls work as expected. Motion sensors and other stuff (have some KNX stuff) are all connected to HA. All the automations are done through HA controlling the stuff on different bridges throughout the house. This way you hardly notice that it is not one big HA mesh, only when you use the HUE app to control the lights you need to select the correct HUE bridge.
This setup also puts less strain on the zigbee network connected to HA, reliably controlling 400+ devices would be a challenge I think.
Smart dimmers / switches and dumb bulbs would drastically cut down on the controllable devices though, you most likely wouldn’t install one dimmer per bulb. As an example I have around 28 dumb spotlights connected to five zigbee dimmers. But yes, you cannot control the color or brightness individually on each bulb that way.
Cost difference is also quite large, at the main supplier here where I live a Hue bulb with color capabilities goes for around 42 Euro, while a dumb, dim to warm bulb is 17 Euro.
Thanks for your detailed response. I think I will end up with a solution similar to yours. I have already planned out how I will divide my ~200 odd Hue devices across 5 bridges and will do the automations through HA as you’ve described.
Thanks so much for giving me confidence that it will work out for me!
I appreciate where you’re coming from, however the main reason I wanted Hue bulbs is that I want to dynamically change the colour temperature of the bulbs throughout the day. Unfortunately dumb bulbs don’t address the requirement.
You only need a hue bridge/account for firmware updates that you can’t get via HA.
I am using 3 hue bulbs and 1 hue light strip directly through zigbee zha via my skyconnect no issues and am using the circadian lighting integration to auto adjust the brightness and temperature through the day and night when they are turned on via motion and door sensors.
Are there Hue updates that you only can do via the Hue hub? I only have Hue bulbs and plugs but they all update fine through Zigbee2MQTT.
Agreed, I have 60 Hue devices and Z2M handles all the updates.
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There is a zigbee firmware option for them but I have yet to see it come up with telling me there are new updates with ZHA, before this was added all updates were to be done through their hubs and accounts.
This is what I see in ZHA for my strip for example
I am not sure if its auto updating or its been the same since I got it and its just checking every day.
Is that a regular Hue strip? They should report firmware like this
release notes Philips Hue Support - Release Notes Lamps | Philips Hue
Its this one:
and the bulbs are these:
They show the same in the firmware section:
All Hue lights got an update the 14th of May this year.
" May 14, 2024
All Philips Hue lights
Software version 1.116.3, 67.116.3"
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So we just need to make sure that ZHA properly polls and updates the devices when its being used instead of Z2M. Something the maintainers need to make sure to look into in that case.
At least we know now.
To be honest, I can’t remember what my setup was back then, but as I’ve been renovating the house, I’ve added lots of hue and innr, and this time I persevered and am using z2m only. The motion sensors are working perfectly using the “Motion-activated Light” blueprint. I can’t speak for the dimmers yet, I haven’t set those up, but I take back what I said - the functionality of that blueprint replicated exactly what I needed from Hue.