In our apartment, we currently have six LIFX wifi smart bulbs in various lamps. Everything was working fine. Ask the lights to turn on, they turn off. Change to 50%, and they would. All was good until something changed. We hadn’t changed anything on our network, except there was an update to the eero’s we use as wifi access points. Then everything went to hell.
Now lights will turn on when asked. Or they won’t. We don’t know. Unplugging them and power cycling them seems to make them work again, at least for awhile. But reliability has been shot out the window with these and I’m not sure how to fix it. Will they turn on in the morning when they are supposed to? Maybe… or maybe not.
Where is the issue? I can’t tell and I honestly don’t know how to fix it. I’m not a fan of using wifi for smart home devices but we didn’t have much of a choice here. When we move into the house, we’ll be able to swap out fixtures and light switches and use better technologies like Thread. Right now we live in an apartment though, so we can’t make any permanent changes so light bulbs it is. When I bought the first LIFX bulb, Thread wasn’t even a thing or at least just announced, so wifi was our only real option. I didn’t want to get something expensive like Phillips Hue bulbs just in case it didn’t work, and LIFX bulbs were about $20 a piece back then. I’ve never had to replace a bulb either, so in about four or so years, they’ve worked fine.
Could it have been the eero update? It seems odd that it started happening after the update, but it could also have been a coincidence. The only other time I’ve had issues with bulbs not connecting was when I tried switching over to a Unifi Dream Router. It worked okay for about a month, then out of nowhere, none of the bulbs would connect. Nothing at all. I swapped out that and changed our router back to the main eero for awhile, and it worked fine until today.
I can say that I hope when we move into our house, we will use a combination of Matter over Thread devices and Lutron Caseta with its own protocol and hub. That should reduce problems in the future and make the network more reliable. But for now, I guess we deal with unreliability for a while.
