I installed around a dozen of ecosmart (home depot) light bulbs around the house. They periodically would drop off the network and required the light switch to have power recycled to rejoin the network. More importantly, however, it seemed that anything being routed through these devices also suffered from disconnects from the network as well.
Just to make sure it wasn’t a wifi interference issue, I changed the channel to minimize overlap. I also purchased additional routers throughout the house (have one Tube SZ coordinator and 2 routers along with around 8 sonoff and tradfri plugs throughout the house).
Does anyone know if these lightbulbs are known to be poor routers? Are there any alternatives?
I’ve had the same issues with the old GE brand bulbs and Innr brand. I have had no issues when I finally standardized with Cree. I now have 40 of them. They are a bit more expensive but I found Amazon will run sales on these puppies for about $6 each for the 60 watt equivalent soft white ($8 each for the bright white ones… go figure).
I have 18 of those bulbs spread through 3 bathrooms and our breakfast room and never have trouble with them dropping off. As a matter of fact, a lot of my other zigbee devices like to route through them. It sounds like you still have a dumb switch controlling power to them. Is it possible somebody else in the house is turning the bulbs off/on that way? If so, that could probably cause issues. All of mine have either an Inovelli or Zooz switch set up in “Smart Bulb” mode so they never disconnect line voltage to the bulbs.
They are all smart switches (combo of zooz and inovelli) with local control disabled (only time I have to cycle the actual power is when they fall off to get them to reconnect). I’ve been surprised especially since others have had generally positive experiences. I had even tried to schedule node red to manually cycle the power to prevent them from falling off and caused more problems than it solved. Really not sure why I’ve had such difficulty and at this point I think I’m going to be forced to remove them completely.
Ended up purchasing these to see if it makes a difference. Hoping as end devices they won’t introduce the same issues as I’ve had. Will let you know, appreciate the advice
Those are the most reliable zigbee bulbs I have owned… granted I have 79 devices on my Zigbee network at this point (22 of them are those bulbs), but those ecosmart bulbs have been far better than the hue and sylvania bulbs they had been replacing (and a few old ge link bulbs)…. Zero issues here and I still buy a box on pretty much every trip to Home Depot…
You mentioned changing channels to minimize overlap, which channels are you using for both?
My 2.4Ghz wireless is on channel 11; neighbors is on channel 1 per wifi analyzer. Zigbee was on the default 15 changed it to 20. Overall LQI and RSSI seem to have improved after the changed but still had the lightbulbs falling off.
How many devices in total do you have? I struggled quite a bit with my zigbee network at first until I got a decent number of bulbs/devices. Have you tried any things like putting your zigbee device on a usb extension? I don’t know if that is relevant for the Tube SZ but I know that is mentioned for many other zigbee sticks… I good excuse to buy more bulbs also… (testing purposes)… but in all honesty those bulbs are absolutely rock solid for me.
Total of 65 now with the bulbs removed (total bulbs was actually 31… A little off on my math ). My coordinator is on a USB and separated but I could put it on Ethernet and get it even farther I guess. It is around 6ft away from my router. Wonder if moving my 2.4ghz to channel 3 might help as well?
Hang in there… I mean, when I had to switch over and re-pair all my zigbee stuff (67 devices, 18 light groups and 43 automations) it only took me… the entire 2 day weekend full time.
Everything for the most part retained their connection but all of the entity names and friendly names reset to their defaults. Is there anyway to back those up in the future? Are they supposed to be saved in the zigbee.db? Would have saved me a ton of time. I had to reconnect each to know what was what.
Just as an update, I moved my coordinator from within the same closet as my router that was connected via USB to another room all together connected via cat5. Seemed to fix the problem. Haven’t had the same level of device drop off
). My coordinator is on a USB and separated but I could put it on Ethernet and get it even farther I guess. It is around 6ft away from my router. Wonder if moving my 2.4ghz to channel 3 might help as well?
