I’m having trouble getting Hubitat and Alexa to control Echosmart Zigbee bulbs in a ceiling fan. I can get the LZW36 to control the bulbs (off/on) with no issues. I can get Alexa to control the bulbs with no issues. The issues begin when controlling the bulbs via both methods. When the LZW36 toggles the lights off, Alexa is no longer able to control the bulbs. Toggle the LZW36 back on and Alexa can control the bulbs again. I have setting 31. Local Protection Settings set to “Light” on the LZW36. Does anyone have any pointers that would help me? Thank you!
How are you turning the bulbs off using the LZW36? This would have to be an automation on Hubitat, since there’s otherwise no way for a Z-Wave switch (the LZW36) to directly control your Zigbee bulbs. If sounds like the power is just getting cut to them by the LZW36, preventing on/off commands from working. If you don’t have any such automation and it’s just happening, that sounds like why and would explain the problem. You could verify this by testing with “dumb” bulbs, which will tell you for sure if the power is getting cut.
I know you have the option in the driver enabled that sounds like it should prevent this, so I’m suggesting the above just to verify. You might want to try setting this directly on the device; when writing a custom driver for this a while back, I remember some oddities, though I no longer have any in production at my house to easily test with. Holding the (small) light dimmer button up (or down? not sure if it matters) while tapping the (big) light button itself 8 times should toggle that on or off. The top LED bar will flash when you’re done: red means it’s disabled, while green means it’s enabled. I think this is the only way I ever got it to work.
At this point, I think Alexa is just a distraction, so I’d eliminate that from the picture right now and just try the “On” and “Off” commands (or “Set Level,” etc.) directly from the Hubitat device detail page for the bulbs if you need to perform additional testing. If it doesn’t work there, it won’t with Alexa, either — but I suspect the above is why.
Exactly what @BertABCD1234 said about cutting power to the bulbs. Smart bulbs must be powered continuously. Turn the bulbs on and then enable local protection so that flipping the light switch won’t cut power to the bulbs. Then code an automation to turn the bulbs on and off with a paddle press.
This was exactly it! It never crossed my mind that the option in the driver wasn’t working and I needed to perform the button combination (small light dimmer button up while tapping the big light button 8 times worked).
Bert – thank you so much for your help. You saved me a ton of time!
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