Hello. A few of my phillips hue zigbee groups in ZHA are not syncing when they come on. Usually 1 bulb comes on a bit later then the rest. I’ve turned them off (from power) and back on, but the issue persists. Is there anything I can do on my end to fix it, or is my best bet to just replace the phillips hue bulbs with new bulbs?
How old are the bulbs? Latest firmware on all of them? If it’s just one bulb, you might be able to just swap out that bulb for a newer one as it might be going bad.
Are the bulbs in a Zigbee group, or a HA group?
2 bulbs across 2 groups, but I haven’t moved all the bulbs from Hue to ZHA yet, so don’t know if there are others.
They got moved from Hue to ZHA yesterday, so I expect they are up to date, as they had auto updates turned on in hue, but I honestly didn’t check before moving them over. ZHA says they’re up to date (using zigbee2mqtt’s update repository)
Zigbee group
Given you just added them yesterday, your mesh might still be building or rebuilding (if you added them to an existing mesh) and that’s fairly common when adding new devices. Depending on the controller you have, it can take several hours to a couple of days to completely rebuild and establish proper routes. There’s a lot of variables to factor in (number of mains devices, number of end devices, channel interference, etc) when guesstimating a mesh’s heal rate. You might also want to unpair them from ZHA and then re-pair them again.
If you’re still seeing issues, (and depending on the age of the bulbs), you might want to swap them out for newer ones. The 10 that I have are around 8 years old-ish and I’ve had to replace a couple of them recently. To be fair though, they have gotten a lot of use, so not a big loss in my book.
One other thing that I just thought of is to check your Zigbee channel you are using in ZHA. Hue bulbs are notorious for only liking to be on the “main” channels (11, 15, 20, and 25). If you have ZHA configured to use something like channel 16, that could also lead to the behavior you’re seeing.
I didn’t realize it took a while for zigbee groups to properly form with the mesh. I’ve been moving my entire house from proprietary bulbs to ZHA. ZHA is channel 20 (although I’ve been considering switching to a higher number since wifi is 6). I assumed once they were connected and the group set up, they would work properly. Once I have everything moved to ZHA I will give it a few days to settle before trying to troubleshoot again, since I am moving a lot.
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IMHO, only do this if you don’t have a lot of devices or you are re-pairing devices already. Your mains devices (bulbs, switches, etc) will hopefully change channels automatically. But most, if not all, end devices will have to be unparied and re-paired again to accept the channel change. It’s actually easier to change your WiFi channel than it is a Zigbee channel. Plus, that’s also ONLY if you are experiencing a lot of interference. I’d test your channel interference before you think about changing channels (again, just my opinion here lol).
I mean, they could? It depends on how quickly the mesh heals itself really.
It’s actually impossible to change my wifi channel because my damn router has decided I’m not an adult that can control my own wifi channel. I’ll be getting rid it of it eventually, but other priorities are first.
Do you know how I can test my channel interference?
Hahaha… yeah… I HATE how ISPs make stupid decisions like that. Totally get your frustration there.
Since you’re going ZHA, install this through HACS: GitHub - mdeweerd/zha-toolkit: 🧰 Zigbee Home Assistant Toolkit - service for "rare" Zigbee operations using ZHA on Home Assistant
In the github repo, there are instructions on how you run a topology scan using a service call. There’s also other command line ways to do this (zigpy.py and such), but I think the toolkit is good enough for most everything and should give you a good idea of where your mesh stands.
If you do end up wanting to play with the command line, you can use this repo: zigpy-cli/README.md at dev · zigpy/zigpy-cli · GitHub. If you are on HAOS, you’ll need to install the Terminal & SSH addon.
The sad part is - its not even an ISP router. It’s eero. Which I got because I wanted mesh and at the time didn’t know much of anything. They’re reliable, I’ll give them that, but they offer absolutely NO way of actually changing any real settings. (I’m sure I could if I gave them $100 a year or whatever they want now).
Thanks for the github repo, I’ll look into it.
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Say no more… Before I went with Unifi, I had Eero. Great devices, no doubt, but ugh at actually configuring them.
Have you tried swapping the bulbs around - just to make sure it’s the bulb itself and not something to do with the location?
Yeah. I have other priorities, like a UPS for my server, but I am planning on either going with unifi or TP-link Omada. Leaning towards Unifi. From what I’ve seen they offer easier and better set up for a wifi backhaul (Just to the detatched garage, wired inside the house). Which is very off topic, so I’ll just say thank you for all your help.
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I haven’t, but its 2 bulbs in the same fixture, not even 6 inches apart in one case… I can test, but I find it hard to believe that 6 inches is going to make a difference