Don't buy the Nanoleaf essentials (matter over thread) bulbs from Homey Best Buy Guide!

Questions & Help
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Do.Not.Buy.Nanoleaf.Essentials from the Homey Buyers Guide. Period.

How a company like Homey can suggest (even almost endorse) these bulbs is beyond me.
I have 26 GU10 and E14 socket lightbulbs from Nanoleaf Essentials. They are situated in the same floor, with little to none obstacles in between them.

I bought them because
1; It was on the Homey Buyers Guide,
2; We needed to change a lot of lightbulbs from Wifi to another solution,
3; Wanted to make the move to Matter over Thread, which seemed like the best option for the future.

Everything is paired up. Individual control of each bulb works great. Firmware is updated via the Nanoleaf IOS app.

Then its downhilll from there.

Want a movie night with dim lighting and a cozy color in the living room (12 bulbs)? Please wait 10-15 seconds (or more) while each bulb turns on, adjusts brightness, and adjusts colour.
Want to turn on a lamp with 3 GU10 bulbs, and adjust the brightness? 5 seconds and individual adjustment of each bulb please.

Now, I believed for the longest time that I had done something wrong.
I have removed bulbs that frequently gives timeout-issues (so not to “poison” the thread network), I have adjusted moods, I have tried making manual “moods” in advanced flows with “steps” so to have less commands in the network, I have put all bulbs into smaller groups and applied variuous seconds of delay to them, I have reset bulbs and paired them once more in a last attempt.

NOTHING WORKS. I still get the popcorn-effect of each lightbulb that changes one feature after another.

After a lot of research I find that the issue is with Nanoleaf and that the bulbs have not enabled the Matter-equalent to “Scenes” or “Moods”. This means that when you change 2 bulbs from 50% brightness and warm white to 100% brightness and red colour, Homey have to send 2x Brightness commands, 2x Hue commands, 2x saturation commands AND wait for the confirmation from the bulbs that every command is executed.

Meanwhile, my dum IKEA zigbee bulbs works PERFECTLY. You want 100% brightness and red colour? Yup there you go!
Zigbee bulbs send one package of all commands to the bulb, and then the bulb execute the commands. When it’s done, it sends an “Everything is okay” back to Homey.

Homey, HOW can you have these bulbs in your Best Buy Guide? I LOVE the guide as a way to navigate what works with your system and not, but Nanoleaf Essentials Matter over Thread DOES. NOT.WORK to satisfaction.

The family is furious at home, blaming Homey because “It all works in the Nanoleaf app, not in the Homey-app”. They don’t know how any of this works, which is also why we got Homey in the first place: The simplicity and advertised reliability.

To Homey: Open dialog with Nanoleaf. This cannot stand as a solution in 2025/almost 2026.
To everybody else: Until this is fixed, I recommend (based on my own experience and online search on the matter) that you steer clear of the lightbulbs from Nanoleaf.

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Thank you for sharing your experience!

Because this is a community forum and Athom employees do not actively read it, my recommendation is to contact Athom support.
If Athom is informed of the problem, they may have the chance to improve it. Hope dies last. :wink:

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How many of these issues are really caused by Nanoleaf, and how many by Homey?

Homey has been unable to reliably control more than about 3 devices at the same time for many years, so much so that there are apps that implement workarounds (like adding delays) to make this somewhat workable.

Also, Homey doesn’t support groups for Zigbee, and I’m fairly sure it also doesn’t for Matter, which means that it needs to send commands to each individual device, instead of just a single command per group.

Besides grouping, Matter supports other methods to limit the amount of data required to send over the network, like command batching. I’m also not sure if Homey supports this (but if I had to guess, then no, it doesn’t).

If everything works in the Nanoleaf app you would think that the devices themselves are not the issue.

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Hello, thanks for sharing your feedback.

Matter as a protocol does support “Multicasting” (sending one command to a Group ID that everyone hears at once), just like Zigbee. However, Homey’s current implementation is still relying on unicasting.

Also, Nanoleaf bulbs have had their fair share of firmware stability issues, some of which can be solved by updating to the latest version. So it’s most likely a mix of both things. We will be reaching out to Nanoleaf about this to see if they can provide some more information.

In the meantime, can you open a support ticket? We would like to retrieve diagnostic info from Homey to see if anything else is going wrong.