I recently found a box in storage that contains about 10 Philips Hue bulbs; I had completely forgotten that I used them in the past. At the time, I had them paired to a Hue bridge. The newest is probably at least 6 years old, maybe a bit more.
I now have a Zigbee network with HA, and so I figure I might as well use the bulbs; they all still work. I can’t figure out how to reset them so I can pair them to my Zigbee controller, though. Every article I read assumes that they’re already connected to a bridge, to Amazon Alexa, I have a Hue dimmer controller, or something of the sort.
Is my only option to sign up for a Hue account, set up my old bridge, and reset them through the Hue app? Surely there must be some other way. I found a thread on [that other site that isn’t Lemmy] that gives a routine of switching power on/off to cause a factory reset, but it doesn’t work after several tries.
UPDATE: I was never able to find a method that worked without using my old Hue bridge. I ended up connecting the bridge and manually deleting each bulb. I few I had to add and delete again, but after about an hour of work, I was able to pair them all with HA.
My Hue bulbs are the “original” (3rd gen I think) before Bluetooth was a thing…but I just walked through this whole exact same thing and I could not get them to reset with any number of power cycle routines.
The only way I could get them to actually pair with my HA/Z2M was to manually add them to my old hub (long story why they weren’t already in there), and then delete them.
Yes, it was a pain. But it worked well and once I got the process down I just did 3-5 at a time and worked through them all. YMMV.
This what I ended up doing. Did you have any issues adding them to HA? HA is able to detect them now, but it stops at Interviewing when I try to pair them. I tried 3 different types of Hue bulbs (color, white, a different color model), and they all have the same issue.