I’m new to Homey and currently I only have some HUE lights (9 spots and 2 bulbs) which I use in Homey (without HUE bridge).
Now I was thinking what about a different brand of light bulbs. When I turn on all 9 spots at the same time they won’t start at the same time (I could also add those back to the HUE bridge which would solve this problem, I think). The other bulbs I need to add to Homey to increase the Zigbee network.
But back on topic, what other brands of lights are “good” and why? Offcourse Zigbee is a must. Brands I think about now are Ikea, INNR and HUE.
Let me know your experience in combination with Homey.
Thank you.
I’m very happy with IKEA, but I use the IKEA gateway. Not sure if changing the brand will fix the delay problem, though.
I have some Hue (directly to Homey) which works pretty ok (but obviously expensive).
I also have some IKEA (directly to Homey) they are not that good.
The IKEA are pretty difficult to pair (as you have to be very close to Homey and they frequently prefer connecting to other IKEA products over Homey).
They also lag quite much (possibly due to the number of devices I have?).
For instance I have 3 IKEA bulbs in some of the ceiling lights and setting them “all” does it “one by one” which takes several seconds whats worse is when you want to do two things like dim and set color then you have to go through each iteration one by one which takes a long time.
I also have a single INNR (directly to Homey) plug which seems to work ok, I use it for outdoor light strip so not sure about the latency there.
FIY ( I know this is not ZigBee) I would say I mainly use zigbee because it is cheep (have a ton of xiaomi, and IKEA), z-wave is way better I think mainly as you can mount them behind switches which gives an all out better experience (but at a much higher cost)…
I have 8 IKEA bulbs (in two rooms) connected to the IKEA gateway, and switching them all on or off happens nearly instantaneous (to be honest, I bought the gateway at the same time with the bulbs, because Zigbee on Homey isn’t known to be bulletproof. Never had any problems with the gateway thus far).
Since the Hue bulbs also seem to be turned on one-by-one, I wonder if that’s not a general Homey Zigbee issue.
And about pairing the IKEA bulbs: Zigbee has a “limited transmission power” mode that is used during pairing, because from a security standpoint, that’s when the bulb is the most vulnerable of being “hijacked” by a malicious party. By limiting the transmission power, you decrease the risk of somehing hijacking your device because they would have to be really close to it first.
When you pair IKEA devices with the gateway, you first pair the remote by holding it very close to the gateway, and subsequently you pair each bulb with the remote by keeping both close together as well.
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Maybe it is indeed a Homey thing to turn of lights one by one. I’ve changed the spots back to the bridge and now the all go on and off at the same time. The problem with a single bulb is less throublesome because you cannot realy see the difference.
Interesting, (and sorry for hi-jacking the thread), but I have to ask: I have infrequent dropped packages (i.e.a light not ending up in the expected position) would that also be fixed with an IKEA gateway?
Hmm… maybe I should get myself an ikea gateway… I just assumed that Homey would be better than an cheep Ikea gateway 
Going on and off as a group requires a specific part of the Zigbee protocol to be implemented and used. I have read on this forum (sorry, no link yet) that this is on the backlog of Athom to do. So that would mean that the brand of the bulbs doesn’t matter for this. Many gateways have implemented this, but will create a separate Zigbee mesh.
