Question

Having an issue with one Hue bulb that had been working flawlessly until about 2 days ago. A few times a day now, ST is showing “Devicewatch - Devicestatus is Offline” and this is causing the bulb to turn off. I understand that sometimes the Device Status will have issues but is it normal for the bulb to turn off? I had installed an Inovelli Red Series dimmer last week to control this light with local control disabled, but the bulb was still working ok for a few days after that. So I don’t believe it’s related but figured I would mention it. If I had to narrow it down, seems to have started after Wednesday’s outage.  

Answer 1

You put a hue bulb on a physical dimmer?  

Comments

@mock1 With local control disabled, it just acts as a scene controller. It doesn’t physically dim the bulb.  

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Gotcha. Physical switch, acting virtual.  

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@mock1 Yep. Had an extra one left over. For controlling the front porch light, nice quick way to have a few different commonly used colors ready to go with going into the app. Also set it up to change the LED controller light to match the hue color.  

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If the Inovelli Red Series dimmer is wired without a Neutral then it has to draw power through the bulb (even if local dimming is turned off and the output is "on" it can never deliver 100% as it has to retain some power for its own operation. In effect it is more like a dimmer set to around 95-99%) Remove the dimmer and see if the bulb recovers.  

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@chandler It’s wired with a neutral, still think it could be an issue? The support team at Inovelli had confirmed this would work. I’ll try a regular switch again to see if it’s any better.  

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@iodize70843 I’m still doubtful that the dimmer is supplying 100% clean power. Does it have a minimum load requirement?  

Answer 2

Smart bulbs should not be on dimmers period, even at 100% the dimmer may not be passing straight clean power to the bulb.  

Comments

@sammy the bulb has full, constant power though. It’s a supported configuration with the Inovelli Red Series.  

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@iodize70843 cool feature for it bypass the dimming circuits. Never seen that before.  

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@sammy any smart dimmer or smart switch that works without a Neutral can never deliver 100% power to the bulb. If it did it could not have any power for its own operation. So when set to "on" or "max" the supply to the bulb is missing a small amount of voltage every mains cycle.  

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@chandler I was talking about clean power as I thought LED dimmers tend to modify the waveform and PWM it to dim.  

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@sammy yes, dimmers do modify the AC waveform by switching it off for a variable period each half cycle. So my concern is that no smart switch or smart dimmer (that does not use Neutral) can ever supply 100% of clean AC power.  

Answer 3

Replaced the Inovelli with a “dumb” on/off switch and same thing has happened twice so far with the bulb.  

Answer 4

I had rebooted the ST and Hue hubs separately before posting but that didn’t help. Powered them both off at the same time, restarted and so far so good. I’ll give it a couple of days with the “dumb” switch to make sure there’s no issues, then try the Inovelli again.  

Answer 5

Just in case this helps anyone in the future. The Hue bulb wasn’t going offline or turning off anymore after powering off both hubs at the same time. I tried the Inovelli again with local control disabled, and still working great. Seems that things got out of whack a bit after last week’s outage.