Have any of you used zigbee binding with your Juno wafers? I’ve used the IKEA Styrbar remotes and they work pretty well for on/off but not for dimming. However, from time to time somehow the binding ends up becoming bound to a wrong light somewhere else in the house. It’s a bit mysterious. Looking forward to getting some of the Inovelli Blue switches, probably next week and seeing how those fare!
I’m so glad I came across this topic 
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I was strongly in favor of smart switches over smart bulbs in the past, mostly because 1) I’ve never found an use for them, and 2) I’d like light/switch to work even if the hub is down.
But tunable looks amazing with @kreene1987’s adaptive lighting suggestion, and Blue’s Zigbee binding capabilty allow the lights to be controlled by the switch even if the hub is down.
I am curious what are everyone’s setups like?
- Do you have tunable smart lights all around the house? Or just select rooms?
- In addition to automations that turn on/off the lights, what kind of manual control do your switches have? On/off definitely makes sense. Hold up/down for brightness adjustment? And maybe double tap to loop through temperature changes?
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I’ll go first 
I recently bought and remodeled my house. Part of that remodel was replacing my lights. I found these can lights and replaced every light in my house with them except in the bathrooms.
I have been using Adaptive Lighting with them and everything has been working great so far. Just waiting on the light switches to finalize the setup.
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Okay, I’ll chime in here too. I moved into a new (old) house a couple months ago. Added these Juno lights in three upstairs bedrooms and a living room downstairs. Old plaster walls, wanted to minimize damage to the walls, so went the smart light route. The rooms all have three-way switches that control a central ceiling fan. I still need to figure out the switch situation. For now Ikea Styrbar remotes have been doing the job. Ultimately I might switch the fans out which might give more options (we want to swap out some of them anyway for a different look).
I’ve had lots of challenges getting it all running smoothly. At first had Hubitat in the basement. I think the range was too far. Added a couple Inner smart plugs to act as repeaters. Switched to a sonoff zigbee dongle on a raspberry pi closer to the lights. Thankfully things have been stable now for some time.
I’m curious about the adaptive lighting. For now I’m using zigbee2mqtt on a raspberry pi but not really using any automations. Maybe I’ll set up home assistant and try the above adaptive lighting thing. I do also have an Apple TV and Home Bridge running on a synology box. I think that there might be a way to get Apple’s version of adaptive lighting working but haven’t really tried. For the most part though I’m just happy that I didn’t have to pick a color temperature and can change it when I figure out what temperature I actually want.
Just to round out the picture, I also have a bunch of hue bulbs in the kitchen. Those were existing bulb fixtures so it was easy to just use hue bulbs. There weren’t so many choices before (but now Hue wafer lights are available, maybe I would have gone that way if they were a thing a few months ago, but are pricey). Adding the hue bulbs was not without issues and I ended up putting them on a separate zigbee network with a hue bridge. That’s been working well, I don’t really have a reason to need them all on the same zigbee network.
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This helps. We are moving into a new larger home and I’m about to take the leap. Our interior decorator said that the lighting was “abysmal” so that’s my first big project and best of all the wife approves!
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So I had a similar plan and setup a test rig with one of the Juno Connect smart recessed wafer lights and a Blue 2-1 switch. I was able to get bindings working but the light could not keep up with the messages from the switch. Dimming and brightening lagged the switch and worse even the state of on/off got lost if I acted too quickly on the switch… i.e. tap & hold to full bright, then tap off … light stays on but switch thinks it’s off. same in reverse. Definitely not going to hold up to my family using the switches and expecting them to “just work like normal lights”.
In contrast, the Philips Hue thin wafer light works amazingly well and keeps up 100%… but currently has a color temp change issue that the engineering team is investigating.
In the end I tested about a dozen canless light options and settled on these “dumb” Juno lights which worked flawlessly when driven by the Blue 2-1 as a dimmer. No buzz at all, dims to nearly off, just works. Not a smart bulb so you have to pick your color temp (it’s at least a switch on the LED driver), but at least it’s working buttery smooth on the 2-1.
https://www.homedepot.com/p/RL-6-in-Color-Selectable-2700K-to-5000K-Remodel-Canless-Recessed-Integrated-LED-Kit-RL6069S1EWHDMR/306673240
https://www.homedepot.com/p/Halo-RA-6-in-Selectable-CCT-New-Construction-or-Remodel-Canless-Recessed-Adjustable-Gimbal-Integrated-LED-Kit-RA6069S1EWHDMR/311306354
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How many bulbs did you have setup with the binding? I am wondering if a group binding might help if it is a large number. Seems like things might be working well for you though so maybe not rock the boat? 
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It was just one. Could go pick one back up to do more testing if there’s anything you recommend I try differently.
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Strange that it was doing that with one light. Honestly, I haven’t seen that even with 4 lights (I tried 2 hue and 2 sylvania at the same time). I wonder what was going on.
Maybe it has to do with the Zigbee signal strength? Sounds similar to issues I had in general as I was building out my network. I’m hoping to be able to test my two-in-one switch with binding to my Juno connect wafers in the next week or two, but I need to find some focused time to do so.
Not sure if this is the same model, but it looks like these lights may have some other issues. https://www.amazon.com/Juno-WF6C-RD-TUWH-MW/dp/B08QV3S13W/?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_w=EequD&content-id=amzn1.sym.8cf3b8ef-6a74-45dc-9f0d-6409eb523603&pf_rd_p=8cf3b8ef-6a74-45dc-9f0d-6409eb523603&pf_rd_r=P3CBS6P23X04XA10ENGY&pd_rd_wg=EKkVb&pd_rd_r=5799247a-e201-4d2c-ade4-7929f2a66a5f&ref_=pd_gw_ci_mcx_mi
Yes, that’s the model. This is an interesting dynamic in the smart home industry. The products are complicated and it’s hard to tell the difference between people complaining because they cannot figure out how to use them vs the product just being bad. I’m hoping it’s more of the former in this case because I have 20 of these installed in my house. They have been working pretty well for me lately, but it was pretty painful in the beginning.
True, and there are so many variables involved. I’ve seen it go either way, but hopefully they keep working great for you!
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On that note, the 4 lights I’ve installed have generally been working well when connected via Z2M.
However, I’ve also been having issues with them occasionally losing connection to Z2M, and thus far the only way I’ve been able to get them to reconnect is a factory reset (which unfortunately resets all of them since they’re on the same circuit). Typically, they seem to work fine for 1-3 weeks, but gradually start losing connection after that.
What’s interesting is that if they’re included in a ZigBee group, the light will still respond to group commands; it’s just individual commands that stop working.
I’ve updated the firmware on my Sonoff 3.0 P-Dongle, and that seemed to help a bit (had around 24 router devices attempting to connect; new firmware increased the capacity for that), but hasn’t fully solved it. Worth noting that my Sonoff dongle is about 10 feet from the lights, with no barriers in betwee, though there is a WiFi AP about 3-4 feet away. No connection issues with other Zigbee devices though.
I’m also a complete novice to making custom zigbee converters, so might have something a bit off there.
I’ll continue to tinker a bit and see if I can resolve it. That said, my understanding is these lights are several years old and, as far as I can tell, haven’t had firmware updates. So it’s possible that their compatibility with the newest Zigbee standards isn’t perfect.
If I continue to have issues, I may swap back to non-smart dimmable wafers on a Blue switch or look into the (significantly more expense) brand new Hue Slim Downlights (link: Hue White and color ambiance Slim Downlight 5/6 inch | Philips Hue) which, as far as I can tell, are the only alternate broadly available Zigbee slim downlights capable of color or color temp.
Recently received a Blue Series 2-in-1 switch and successfully bound these Juno Connect wafers with it in Z2M. The switch and lights are working great together!
Only weird behavior is in HA, where for some reason it’s not consistently registering on/off state changes in the Zigbee group when the switch is used to toggle it as opposed to app/voice/automations. This can cause some weird behavior from Adaptive Lighting or other integrations/automations that rely on on/off states (example: if I turn the lights off with the switch and HA doesn’t register the change, Adaptive Lighting turns them back on during the next “transition” because it thinks they’re still on and it’s sending a turn_on service request with update brightness and color temp values). But I suspect this is something I need to tweak in my Z2M and/or HA settings and not an issue with the bulbs (or switch).
Has anyone used SmartThings to bind multiple Juno Connection lights with their Blue Series 2-1?
Smartthings doesn’t support zigbee groups or binding as far as I am aware. It will only perform a software group which basically just controls all of the grouped items in series, but still as individual devices.
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I created an account here just to add to the documentation since this seems to be the only place on the internet where discussion of these wafers is happening.
I’m firm on Zigbee/Z-Wave devices for lighting in my house for various reasons and have become accustomed to circadian/adaptive auto adjustment throughout my house. My living room has no ceiling lights, so I was excited to finally have an option for diffuse lighting with these Juno wafers.
I installed a test unit in my utility room and was immediately disappointed. It paired just fine to ZHA via HUSBZB-1 but that was about the only success. My issues:
- They can’t keep up with frequent updates. Changing brightness and color quickly will eventually end up in the whole thing crashing and becoming unresponsive to further changes until the power is cycled.
- They eventually become unresponsive anyway. Home Assistant detects them as unavailable after a few minutes of powering on. Power cycling will bring them back but only momentarily.
I have 25+ tunable bulbs from various manufacturers in my house along with remotes. I’ve never had issues with any Zigbee hardware, honestly. At first I thought this may be an issue with a device limit on my Zigbee adapter, but after removing a bunch of them to test, there was no change. All the bulbs are operating as routers, so I don’t think this is a device limit issue.
I’m in the process of making my smart home user friendly and unreliable devices like this don’t fit. I replaced the test unit with a dumb CCT selectable unit. All of the Hue hardware in my house is rock-solid, so those new color wafers are really interesting to me. $70 each is damn steep though, so I’m hoping there’s a sale or they come out with a much cheaper white tunable version.
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Sounds like you ran into the same behavior I did when testing these. Unfortunate because otherwise it would make a great pairing. I did end up selecting some Juno Canless Regressed E26 fixtures paired with some Hue bulbs to get reliable smart bulb behavior in a couple select spaces - but they require way more space in the ceiling than the wafer lights.
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