It took a really long time but Philips Hue lighting has finally fixed one of the most annoying issues with their smart home lighting. If you suffer a power outage, the default for Hue lights has been to return to the full ON stage when power is restored. That means, for example, at my house on Prickly Mountain where I have many Hue lights, that if we get one of our frequent power outages or blips, when the power is restored every light in the house comes on with full brightness. That tends to be a rude awakening.
This is the reason that I unplug my Hue controller when I rent out my house in the winter to skiers. They could be very confused if there is a power outage!
You must upgrade your iOS Hue app to version 3.11.0 and then you will need to go to each individual light in the new “Power-on Behavior” setting where you can choose either “Philips Hue Default” (which turns the light on with full brightness) or “power loss recovery” (which reverts to the last used color and brightness ). Setting it to power loss recovery will leave the light off when power is restored.
Unfortunately, there is no way to set all of your lights at once to power loss recovery so you must go into each individual light and set it the way you want. I am going to set mine to all be in their last state. For safety reasons I could see why some people might want one or two to come on automatically after a power outage.
I have noticed that some Hue lights are not supported, at least at this time. I cannot make too much sense why some are supported and some are not but perhaps there will be further updates. Nevertheless, this is a big improvement.
