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One default transition time for all your lights in Home Assistant

Lights that snap on feel cheap. With a fixed 0.4-second transition every light change feels calm, whether it came from a button or a scene.

Published
Reading time
2 min read
Level
Beginner
Tested on HA
2026.10
Lees in het Nederlands

You have a Hue bulb and a cheaper Zigbee bulb in the same room, and one of them feels more expensive than the other. That difference is not in the light. It is 0.4 seconds. Philips Hue fades to the new level over that time by default on on, off and dimming, while most other bulbs slam straight to it. That is why Hue bulbs feel "soft".

The good news is that you can adopt it across your whole house, and it takes about five minutes.

In Zigbee2MQTT

Set a default transition for all devices in Zigbee2MQTT's configuration.yaml, then restart Zigbee2MQTT:

device_options:
  transition: 0.4

Every command without its own transition now takes 0.4 seconds. That includes your physical buttons, as long as they run through Zigbee2MQTT.

In Home Assistant

For lights that do not go through Zigbee2MQTT, and for scenes, you pass the transition in the action itself:

- action: scene.turn_on
  target:
    entity_id: scene.woonkamer_standaard
  data:
    transition: 0.4

Make a habit of it, because this is where it falls apart: every light.turn_on, light.turn_off and scene.turn_on in your automations gets transition: 0.4. Miss one action and you have exactly that one light that stands out. Write the convention down in your repository or your notes, so you still know in six months.

Exceptions

  • Wake-up and sleep: a wake-up scene is allowed to take minutes. There you pick a long transition on purpose.
  • Warnings: a light flashing because everything is about to switch off should snap. Otherwise you will not notice it.
  • Lights without transition support, like some cheap plugs and relays, simply ignore the value. That is fine and needs no workaround.

Your moods too

When you pick a mood or scene from your dashboard, stick to the same 0.4 seconds. A longer transition feels sluggish once you have pressed something yourself, because then you are waiting for an answer.

Frequently asked questions

Why exactly 0.4 seconds? It is the Philips Hue default, and it reads as immediate without being abrupt. Longer feels slow when you press a button yourself.

Does this work for physical buttons? Yes, as long as the button sends its command through Home Assistant or Zigbee2MQTT. IKEA buttons on scenes covers how to set that up.

My light ignores the transition. Now what? Not every light supports it. Check in Zigbee2MQTT whether the device exposes a transition option; if it does not, it will always switch instantly and there is nothing to be done.

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