Zigbee2MQTT with Adaptive Lighting

Configuration Zigbee
1

I have ~50 or so IKEA bulbs + sensors in my house. Initially I used the IKEA gateway, which worked fine for a while, but I kept having issues with bulbs being dropped and having to be repaired. In addition to this, I ended up having to power cycle the gateway on a weekly basis (using a smart plug).

As my smart home started to evolve, I wanted to give some native Zigbee stuff a go and ended up moving all my communication to Zigbee2MQTT (Z2M). Generally speaking, I’ve been happy with it and it seems reliable (after tweaking the configuration a bit).

However, I still have one issue left. When my bulbs are turned off on the wall (i.e. power off), they are of course unavailable. Z2M picks this up fine, and whenever I power them back on, Z2M picks them back up in a matter of seconds. The problem however is HA. It appears as even if the lights are available and usable (e.g. i can change the settings/state in Z2M), they don’t seem to be fully picked up in HA until I’ve manually toggled them in ZM. Subsequently the adaptive lighting do not work.

Is this a known issue?

2

You broke the golden rule that applies to smart bulbs: they should be powered on all the time.

Because you’re removing power from them, you introduce stability issues in your Zigbee network which could also have caused the problems that you had with the IKEA gateway.

2 Likes
3

Right, i completely understand that from a theoretical perspective. However, that still doesn’t explain why the lights appear to be working just fine in Z2M, but not in HA.

4

Do you have availability enabled in z2m?

5

Yes, this is what I’m using to make the assumption about if it has been picked up or not by Z2M.

6

You should use an MQTT client (like MQTT Explorer) to check if z2m automatically sends a message when it notices that a device has become available. If not, that would probably be the cause of your problems (other than breaking the golden rule).