Or my Raspberry Pi SD card failed, and of course I had Zigbee2MQTT running there with Sonoff Zigbee USB-adapter for controlling my Hue lights etc with Home Assistant. After reconfiguring Zigbee2MQTT on my main “server”, I was faced with the dilemma of needing to pair my Hue lights to the new instance. But when Googling around I was only finding instructions on how to do the reset with the dimmer but that didn’t work at all for me. Then (ofc) on Reddit I found the good way to do th reset.

Proper way to reset Hue lights

This was the recipe that worked for me:

  • Turn on the light for 5 seconds
  • Turn off the light for 2 seconds
  • Turn on the light for 8 seconds
  • Turn off the light for 2 seconds

And repeat the 8 + 2 process for few times until the light flashes. This indicates that it has entered pairing mode and the light will be picked up by Zigbee2MQTT pretty much instantly.

Adding lights back to Home assistant

Then I just had to reconfigure my light setup in Home Assistant. I had made couple groups of lights and it was easy to redo those as I just needed to update the group and all automations that used the group were fine.

Lesson learned: I’ll add even single lights to a group, which will make easier to change stuff on the backend.