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.
I had to get a hue remote to properly reset my bulbs.
If you use zigbe2mqtt and your zigbee adapter supports touchlink you can reset them using that.
I had to deal with this two days ago. Using one of the new remotes, you have to get very close to the lamp and hold down the power and the scene button for ten seconds. My color lamp started flashing cold white and once it was fully reset it glowed in warm white. After that it was ready to pair again. The remote doesn’t need to be paired to the lamp.