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Third-party apps for the Hue smart lighting system allow you to access settings and inputs on your Hue Bridge that you can’t find with the Hue app.
From time to time, you may run into an issue with your Hue smart lighting system that seems unresolvable, a real ghost in the machine. Before you reset your individual bulbs or even your entire system, try one of these apps.
Hue app is great, but simple
As a long-time Hue user (my original 1st generation bulbs are still working great after ten years!), I can confidently say that the Hue app is really great. It’s easy to use, the user interface is polished, and 99.99% of the time, anything you need to do with your Hue system can be done with the app.
But the simplicity and super-slick UI is actually a bit of a limitation when things go a little awry with your Hue system. You’ll quickly find yourself running out of troubleshooting options and faced with clumsy fixes like manually resetting bulbs and fixtures or even resetting your Hue Bridge just to resolve seemingly phantom issues.
For example, this is one of those phantom problems straight from the smart lighting dyno that is my home. A few months ago I bought some new Hue bulbs.
As part of that process, I’ve been moving some old bulbs, putting the new brighter and better bulbs in a more prominent location, and migrating the older bulbs to outdoor fixtures, because colorful smart bulbs make such easy holiday lighting.
Soon after, I ran into the strangest problem. The old bulbs would light up randomly. She would come home from an errand and notice that the porch light would often come on (and it was an odd color like deep red or bright pink).
However, when I looked in the Hue app, nothing seemed amiss. Each bulb was in the correct room and area. No random bulbs or bulbs paired with Hue switches in ways you wouldn’t expect.
If I were just using the Hue app to fix this, it would seem like my only solution would be to reset one or more bulbs or even, short of that resolution, reset my Bridge.
Anyone reading this who is already heavily involved in the Hue ecosystem knows exactly what a pain that would be. No one with smart bulbs and accessories all over their home and yard wants to waste an entire Saturday afternoon dealing with a system reset.
Unlocking Third Party Apps Advanced Troubleshooting
If resetting my Hue Bridge wasn’t a nice option for me, what was? The best solution to fixing problems with Hue lights is not to bombard your system and start over, but to turn to the myriad of great third-party Hue apps on the market to dig deeper.
The Hue system was the first truly polished ready-to-use smart lighting system on the market. As such, it attracted all the early adopters, which includes people who like to tinker and tweak everything about their smart homes. Third-party apps have sprung up to fill that gap and offer more granular control over the Hue system.
While the ability to add cool scenes like simulated thunderstorms or other clever lighting parlor tricks is really cool, what’s even cooler is seeing the raw data and inputs in the Hue Bridge. The ability to do so is exactly what helped me solve my lighting problem without reboots.
By loading my Hue Bridge into the popular hueDynamic app (available for iOS, Android, and Windows), I was able to locate the phantom issue immediately. The problem was also visible when I viewed my Bridge using iConnectHue, another great app, but unfortunately only for iOS.
My specific problem? The Hue Bridge software had the malfunctioning bulbs grouped into a grouping of rooms that I didn’t recognize. This pooling was only visible in third-party apps (or, if you’re willing to roll up your sleeves and read the documentation, using Hue’s developer debugging API).
The group had a strange name. A.bedroom1 which isn’t a valid user-created name, so there’s no way you created it at all. This mystery room was sort of a remnant of an old room that had been removed from the Hue app but with a corrupted name and zero presence on the official Hue app.
Some of the old light bulbs that changed seemingly random colors outside my house were not changing randomly. They changed whenever someone triggered scenes in a current room where the bulbs had previously been. The scene change would change the scene for the ghost A.bedroom1 and color the bulbs blue, red, pink or whatever the scene calls for.
By removing the ghost room from my Hue Bridge, I was able to instantly resolve the issue without having to reset a single bulb or, thankfully, reboot my Bridge.
I describe the problem here in detail not only to highlight how helpful third-party Hue apps are in the troubleshooting process, but also in the hope that, by the magic of internet searching, someone with the exact, strange problem but hard to pin down. I have experienced you will find this article.
This isn’t the first time apps like hueConnect have come to my rescue in the years I’ve been using Hue lights. Several times over the years, I’ve run into a situation where, despite my best efforts, I couldn’t get first-party Hue bulbs or compatible third-party bulbs to successfully pair with my Bridge. In all cases, I was able to do this using the force adoption methods available through the Hue Lights iOS app (if you don’t have access to an iOS device, you can also force adoption using the Java-based Hue Lamp Finder tool).
So if you’re a Hue fan who’s never dabbled in third-party apps before, I highly recommend downloading a few and playing with them now. Later, if a phantom problem appears on your otherwise smoothly running Hue system, you can dig in and fix the problem without pulling your hair out and performing a hard reset.
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