HomeKit Lights coming on dimmed when using "Hay Siri" and HomePods

[scotio200]

Have a few Philips Hue lights all controlled via HomeKit.

Recently when asking Siri to turn on a light using a HomePod or HomePod mini the light will sometimes come on at 100%, but mostly they come on very dimmed.

This happens with different types of lights in different rooms. We usually end up repeating the turn on request and specify 100% brightness in our request. (Never needed to do this in the past)

Im not sure what setting I need to change. Here is what ive done so far:

I have gone into the Hue App and set light defaults for individual lights to be 100%

I have disabled the adaptive light feature on the lights that support this, but this is also happening on lights that don't support adaptive lighting.

I have disabled all automation and deleted any Siri Shortcuts that I had setup

I have removed all lights from HomeKit, removed the Hue Hub from home kit and re-added everything

Is there something im missing here? This has been happening since before iOS 16 came out too so it's not that.

 

[dotme]

Sometimes, an "on" command will bring the lights up with their last-set brightness (So if they were at 25% when turned off, an "on" command will bring them back on at 25%). If you specify the brightness with the initial command and they still come on dimmed randomly, there may be a communication issue. I used to see that a lot when I had overlap between my 2.4GHz WiFi channel and the Hue's Zigbee channel. Once I fixed that, the trouble went away. Hope this helps.

 

[dotme]

Update: Just saw you posted over on Reddit too - so I'm going to lean towards communication trouble as being the culprit based on the additional info you posted there. When you tell Siri to turn a Hue light on, it powers it on then sets the brightness and it sounds like that second command isn't always reaching the bulb. It's slightly different than when using the Hue app, since it's able to bundle power state and brightness into a single push.

Apartments can add an extra layer of complexity with competing WiFi signals, but Zigbee signals can get trampled by 2.4GHz WiFi frequencies and when that happens, you can see symptoms like the one you describe.

ZigBee and Wi-Fi Coexistence | MetaGeek

ZigBee transmits on the same part of the 2.4 GHz spectrum as Wi-Fi, and when both protocols are transmitting at the same time, it causes interference that can damage the quality of the Zigbee signal. In this lesson, we’ll cover how to design a network for Wi-Fi and Zigbee to peacefully coexist.

www.metageek.com

The link above is great - Especially if it might be your own WiFi router that's stepping on the Zigbee channel. It's easy to change your Zigbee channel in the Hue app, the page above will be a guide to selecting the best one, and that might be the magic fix for your issue. I have manually set both my 2.4GHz WiFi and Zigbee channels to be far apart and rarely see Hue issues any more.

 

[scotio200]

Thanks for the reply, I noticed I can't specify the channel in the hue app, do I just let it do its thing and it will pick the best channel available?