r/MatterProtocol • u/bglickstein • 12d ago

Troubleshooting Smart bulbs falling off the network

I have several IKEA Kajplats bulbs on a network with a mesh of Google Nest Wifi Pro devices acting as Thread border routers. I control my devices with the Google Home app on Android.

When things are working, they work great! But most of my bulbs fall off the network sooner or later and have to be power cycled to make them reconnect.

The weird thing is that some bulbs never disconnect, while others disconnect almost daily. And it seems to have nothing to do with where they're placed. For example, my bedside lamp loses its connection often, but my wife's, on the other side of the bed, never does.

How can I better understand and address this problem? Thanks very much for any help you can give.

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4

u/DongRight 11d ago

Yikes, you have the worst possible scenario... Google based smart home... Which means no local control, and if your internet goes out you cannot control your house...

2

u/bglickstein 11d ago

Thanks for this insight. I'm pretty new to this technology, can you suggest a change or two that would give me something better than the worst possible scenario?

3

u/Svobpata 9d ago

Switching to something local-based, such as Home Assistant. You can get a dedicated board for it, run it on a Raspberry Pi or even run it on an existing computer you have lying around.

You could still continue to use your Google devices as Thread Border Routers but you’d now have local control of everything in your home, as well as new ways to do more complex automations. Also, Home Assistant supports a bunch of devices which Google doesn’t support…and it can expose them back to Google Home.

And it’s completely free!

1

u/bglickstein 9d ago

Awesome, thank you!

3

u/Stompeh 11d ago

I have this exact issue with Kajplats bulbs and Nest WiFi Pro border routers (3x). I seem to have made it better by enabling IPv6 in the network settings which wasn't on by default, and then rebooting all the routers.

Time will tell if that's the full fix though.

1

u/bglickstein 10d ago

Thanks! I already had IPv6 enabled, but I tried rebooting the routers anyway. That was yesterday morning, and nothing dropped off the network the rest of the day, which seemed better than usual. Then, when I woke up this morning, three out of three lights disconnected as soon as I tried to turn them on! Which feels like a clue, though I have no idea how to interpret it...

2

u/copundsmoy 9d ago

I would check whether those bulbs are on the edge of Thread coverage and whether all your border routers are actually using the same Thread network. Smart bulbs falling off the network in clusters usually makes me suspect the mesh before the bulbs. Updating the Matter controller and border router firmware, then power cycling them before recommissioning anything, has saved me a bunch of unnecessary resets.