Smart bulbs not being seen by some apps?

[ericmark]

The outside light, by my pond, was programmed to light for the milkman, which it has done without a problem, but also was used with other visitors, and it was reporting off-line.

I assumed I had changed a socket adaptor somewhere, which was boosting the zigbee signal, so I swapped around some smart sockets, to no avail, and in the end swapped the bulb, all attempts to switch on/off 3 and 5 times to reset it have failed, TCP colour changing bulb, if that matters.

I also have 4 GU10 bulbs reporting as off-line, but the Google Nest voice command still works, so not touched them. Bulbs have gone down in price, last lot from PoundLand cost £5 each, where I was paying around £12 so not really worried about losing control of one bulb. Over the time when I have been using smart devices, lost three smart light switches, two smart sockets, and one smart socket adaptor, and one (maybe two if this bulb US) bulbs, so in the grand scheme of things, in around 7 years, that's not bad, but loathed to dump the items if there is a way to breathe life back into them.

The sockets and light switches seemed to turn themselves into flasher units. And this is not all one make, so it does seem they are waiting to be programmed in again, but attempts to do that have failed.

Any thoughts?

 

[morqthana]

I haven't lost any ordinary light switches, ordinary sockets, or ordinary adapters in much, much, more than 7 years.

 

[morqthana]

An FYI for any users of this forum with a passing interest in home automation who don't read the specialised forum:

Futurehome Smarthub, WeMo, & Nest Gen 1.

What do all these have in common? The manufacturers have decided to make them stop working, or to only continue to work if you now pay a regular subscription fee which was not part of the deal when you bought the product...

www.diynot.com

 

[ericmark]

In essence, my wife and I are lazy, we don't really want to get up to turn on the lights, and when the dusk option turns on the living room light, I am quite happy it does that.

However, also the floors are not easy to be lifted, so installing two-way switching with the hard-wired method is not really an option. And with middle floor, we are lacking enough ceiling roses, we have fitted a large chandelier but it is not really enough to light the whole room, so we use up-lighters, cabinet lights, and others to light the dark areas, also can be used just to make it look good, but this can result in an array of lights which need switching off before retiring to bed each night, so "hey Google turn off living room lights" is far easier to say, than walking around the room to turn them all off. And the designers of the house, put the landing light switch by the front door, the other end of the hall to where the stairs start, and all internal room doors converge, so again voice control seemed to logical way around the problem. It means, even with a cup of coffee in each hand, I can turn lights on/off.

The cost saving using smart options against using hard-wired options must be huge, even without looking at the disruption. Re-wall papering, to hide new traces for wires, means hard-wired options are very expensive.

So we have quite a few smart light switches, bulbs, and socket adaptors.

 

[morqthana]

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In case it should ever be of interest, an FYI for you - you can put Billy doors on pairs of Benno shelves...