In an interesting development since installing my 9 Blues yesterday, several of them today have somehow bound themselves to random Innr 224 zigbee plugs I already had in my mesh.
I’m on a Hubitat C7. Parameter 51 confirms 4 bindings for most cases – is there any way to unbind those somehow (51 is read-only), and how would I prevent this inadvertent binding from ever happening again?
Many thanks!
It’s my understanding that zigbee mesh’s itself automatically and that these as “routers” can be bound to and bind to other items to get back to the coordinator. I’m not aware of any forcing of non-bindings. It’s supposed to “optimize” so I trusted the process.
Oof, that’s not great – especially when you have no inkling as to what they are bound to…
I’m now attempting to reset the affected switches - that seems to work, but I fear they may just start doing the bindings on their own again sooner or later.
If they do, these things aren’t going to last long in my house lol!
FWIW, I’d suspect something is amiss with the way the Innr plugs handle binding. They’ve been promiscuous for me in the past too.
The unwanted binding was with IKEA Tradfri controls. Was trying to bind to a different local bulb via Touchlink, and it managed to take over most of the Innr plugs and Cree bulbs in the house. (The Cree bulbs are ancient, ~2017.) The RGBGenie remote could pull the same trick.
I’d suspect that somehow the Blues are triggering a find-n-bind mode, and that the Innrs are happy to play along and jump in when they shouldn’t.
Makes sense, but I’d wager this will be a problem for a fair # of Blue users since those are pretty popular plugs.
I’m not keen to replace all of those, so hopefully this can be addressed by Inovelli with a f/w or driver tweak.
I’m confused what the issue is.
If the mesh is optimizing it’s routing tables constantly (per the zigbee spec), it’s going to result in the best user experience and each device has multiple paths in it’s routing tables.
What are you concerned about?
When I turn on some of my Blues, they also turn on a few Innr plugs too (fans, lights, etc). They also turn them off (which is nice), but I don’t want my Blues bound to those plugs at all.
It’s most definitely not a rules-based setup error or something like that – I’ve been able to shake the bindings by resetting most switches. I suspect it all happened this morning when I powered down my Hubitat for 30 minutes in hopes of getting a fresh zigbee mesh heal after installing all my Blues last night.
My one last switch I was working to reset seems to have bricked though – I can’t get it to reset by paddle/config button method, air-gap method or even pulling the breaker.
Argh. very frustrating to say the least. I really wish I bought 1 extra Blue as a spare in my order. I’ll look into the RMA process next.
Or if anyone knows a secret reset trick, I’m all ears!!
The OP’s description sounds like literal Zigbee binding, while it seems like you might be thinking of routing (or repeating, to steal a Z-Wave term that is sometimes used for the same thing). That is generally desirable, but random binding definitely isn’t. 
Whoa, yeah ROUTING is very different than CONTROLLING! @EricM_Inovelli definitely worth investigating.
Thanks Robert! Yeah, I see now I could’ve been much clearer in my OP… I think I was still in a state of shock when I posted.
I’m almost certain this just started today (not during or immediately after initial install yesterday), and (again) I’m thinking it was somehow triggered by doing a full system/zigbee-mesh power down this morning. But maybe I’m jumping to conclusions - I don’t want to bite off on the first possible clue.
Anyway, perhaps Eric can see if there’s anything odd in the code. It was all Innr 224 plugs for me though. Otherwise, I really like those plugs (I have a lot of 'em), so I’d rather not get rid of them all if possible.
Nuts, the reset / re-pair trick did not work – all affected switches became reinfected with unwanted control-related bindings within a couple hours.
Oof, now I gotta take all these Blues out… I can’t have random stuff getting turned on. What a bummer.
Yikes - it goes deeper… I just realized the Blue out in my garage is somehow bound to the Blue controlling my basement lights (and vice versa) – they turn each on/off (along with a random smattering of Innr 224 plugs). My 3rd infected switch (Hallway) just turns on/off a few nearby Innr 224 plugs (unsolicited), but doesn’t seem bound to another Blue.
I most definitely did NOT bind those two Garage/Basement switches together.
There’s definitely something wrong with the binding-related code in these switches.
Do the bindings appear even if your HE is offline? I only have 1 Blue installed, but it hasn’t spontaneously bound to any of my 5 Innr 224s or my 1 234. I also dont have an HE running anymore
Excellent question – just confirmed all unwanted bindings still persist when the hub is shut down.
So far, it just seems to be an issue with 3 of my 9 Blues… Well, down to 8 now since I somehow bricked one earlier when resetting it. I’ve got some Zooz’s enroute now to replace those infected 3 Blues in the near term… Long term, I’ll hope & pray my other Blues don’t start doing this and that a f/w or driver fix can resolve it for good.
Thanks for the help!
No, my question was if new bindings show up after the HE is shut down? Want to rule out something in the new driver code running on HE as a suspect
I think I’m tracking… I haven’t seen any new odd-ball bindings since I shutdown for a few minutes ~1 hour ago, but I’ll keep checking this evening and tomorrow morning.
The bindings did all re-appear on the 3 switches I reset & re-paired eailer today – when I first did those resets, they all showed “0” for parameter 51 for a while. But within a couple hours, parameter 51 said “4” for all 3 switches again. And that’s when I discovered that 2 of those Blues had become bound together too – that was definitely not the case before I reset all 3 switches.
Man, this is a real head-scratcher…
I have never heard of zigbee devices automatically binding together without user input. I can’t even think of how it could happen.
Arrrrrgh, now it’s spreading again… now 4 of the Blues have bound themselves together, along with a smattering of zigbee plugs to boot. Pretty soon here, I’ll be able to simultaneously turn on/off every ZB device in my house with one of those switches.
And Parameter 51 doesn’t seem to be a reliable indicator anymore – one of those switches still shows “0” there.
This has been a fun ride, but my order’s now placed for mix of Zooz and Caseta replacements – I can’t have a bunch of switches in my house be this unpredictable.
Hopefully everyone else’s Blue journey ends happily!
ETA - I uninstalled Inovelli’s binding app yesterday after a trial experiment, so I don’t think that’s somehow gone rogue behind the scenes.
Did you delete the app file after uninstalling the app? Any reboots? In 2 years running HE I never saw a zombie app, but it doesn’t mean it can’t happen.
I literally now have 13 Blues added to HE and not a single zombie pairing. This is one of the strangest things being reported.