Would I need to keep my Hue Bridge?

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.

1 Like

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.