I have a 2nd generation Hue bridge and I almost gave up on it because of reliability. I don’t have experience with the 1st gen bridge, but I was able to vastly improve Hue reliability in my house by doing 3 things:
- Move the bridge away from my wifi router
- My bridge was fairly close to my Airport Extreme. There may have been interference since they both run on 2.4gHz. I just moved it about 5 feet away.
- Change the channel on the Hue bridge
- I changed from the default channel (11 I think?) to 20 in the settings of the Hue app. I’m not sure if the bridge does any sort of automatic channel selection.
- Make sure there are no obstructions near the bridge
- For a long while, I actually had the bridge sitting on top of an old macbook which was made out of aluminum. The hue lights downstairs only worked about 50% of the time. Removing that obstruction made an immediate difference in the communication. You might have similar problems if it’s sitting on top of metal audio components or shelving.
I’ll admit that I’m not sure exactly which of those changes were responsible for the improvement, and to what degree, but after making these changes, OH2 has been able to control my hue lights without any issue. As far as I know, not a single command has been missed since then.