Add all brands to hue and add hue to Homey or use Homey Zigbee

Questions & Help
1

Hi,
I was wondering, i now have ikea tradfri lights, Innr ledstrings and Philips Hue lights in the house.
What is the best way to controle them all with Homey.

  1. Add all the lights to Hue and add the Hue Bridge to homey,
    or
  2. Install all apps from the different brands and add all the lights to Homey’s Zigbee

I there a preferred way?

regards,
Michael

2

I use hue scenes a lot and it’s easier to setup and create them on the hue app so bridge to homey is my preferred choice.

The downside to that would be the latency from homey polling the bridge. Ie Philips hue motion sensors take a second or two to update my flows and any flows I trigger with a hue dimmer switch would respond slightly later.
There’s a slight latency but for me, it’s still acceptable…

I did pair them to homey direct via the Zigbee app and they are very responsive. Great if you just want to turn lights on and off. Once u start making Color scenes for different moods across thirty lights though, the hue bridge with other apps is more straight forward than having a few more flows.

3

Thanks for the reply viix,

I’m using the “Homeykit” Homekit intergration to controle everything and do not use the hue app at all.
I haven’t used the scenes system yet from either hue or homekit but i’m probably gonna set it up (try it soon) with homekit.

The most positive thing of using everything (lights related) through Hue is that i can remove several apps from homey and have more room for other apps.

But i don’t know how bad the bugs are with Homey’s Zigbee feature because i read about stability issues and such.

4

Just for information if someone stumbles upon this topic in future.
After some puzzling i removed all lights from (Ikea, Innr) from Homey’s Zigbee and added them to the Hue bridge.

Now i run less apps on Homey (could remove Ikea and Innr) and the Hue app is really nice(!!)
and i can still use the not Hue branded lights with Homekit with Homey + Homeykit.

Thanks for the support. this topic can be closed.

1 Like
5

Hi Michael, I’m struggling as you with the consistency of ikea bulbs on homey and maybe need to add them to the hue bridge to get them more stable. But as far as I can see, I can’t group bulbs in Hue…how did you solve that? I have a few hue bulbs and it seems I can’t add complete rooms as devices in homey… Will I need to group in homey with device groups…?

6

U put the bulbs in a room with the Hue app on ur phone. Then, in Homey, u can put all lights on in a room. Just drag the Philips Hue card to the THEN colom.
I have all my IKEA bulbs connected directly to Homey to create a mesh for my other zigbee devices like the xiaomi sensors. When u put all IKEA bulbs to the Hue bridge they are on a different mesh network and not helping creating a Homey zigbee mesh. This is just how I do it.

7

And that’s exactly my problem… Whatever i try i can’t get Homey to actually create a Zigbee mesh network.
And Philips Hue does.
So now i have my xiaomi door sensors on the Homey Zigbee and all lights on the Hue.
Now my balcony door sensor only works if i put Homey in my office on the 2nd floor (1e verdieping in Dutch) so i can’t use Homey next to my tv in the living room which kinda sucks…

8

Hi Michael, did you understand Rocodamelshe’s part 9n separate Zigbee networks? Each controller (Homey, Hue bridge) will create it’s own Zigbee network. If all your lamps are connected to the Hue bridge, they are not part of the Homey Zigbee network (Homey accesses them indirectly via the Hue bridge). And that way they cannot be part of any mesh of the Homey Zigbee network. This is the way Zigbee works, Homey cannot influence this (neither can the Hue bridge).

Solution would be to remove bulbs from the Hue bridge and add them directly to Homey using the Ikea app or Hue Zigbee app (not the Hue Bridge app).

9

Hi thanks for your reply, i do understand. The reason i use zigbee like this is because
I have a different topic where i explain that the hopping doesb’t seem to work when i add everything directly to homey.

https://community.homey.app/t/is-it-possible-to-force-zigbee-mesh-usage/

I have added and removed, placed my lights on different places etc. homey refuses to make the lights “mesh hop” to eachother… and so this is the way i’m using it now and homey functions as a homekit (homeykit) bridge for siri.

10

My understanding is different:
Homey acts as the mesh master while all other routers are just slaves in the mesh; therefore it would’ve to be possible to trigger flows across all devices, mixed up, no matter which router they’re assigned to as the flows always and only get triggered by Homey, the one to control them all).

Pls correct me if I’m wrong!

11

Here’s some good news: