I have two Sonoff smart outlet devices. When I first added them, they worked well. However, after a couple weeks they started to occasionally miss commands (e.g. I wake up the next morning, and the lamp never turned off from the night before).
I find that power cycling the plug or restarting the hub can help to jolt them back into behaving properly.
Has anyone else experienced this? How can I stop it? I basically can't trust it to be working.
I've done everything in that guide. There's really no "mesh" here, the hub is about 10 feet from one outlet, and the other is about 15 feet beyond that.
I had this happen to me a while back. Turned out I had interference and had to fix a couple of things:
Here is the WiFi vs Zigbee channel interference (the WiFi channel number is not the same as the Zigbee channel number):
I am currently using channel 20 for my Hubitat and channel 15 for my Philips Hue hub. Once I made this change, everything became super reliable on Zigbee and Hue. (Currently 31 Zigbee devices, and 24 Hue devices).
Glad you managed to resolve it. I only have the one hub (Hubitat), which is on channel 20 to minimize interference. My wifi routers are Deco (mesh of 3), which won't let me manually pick a channel because supposedly they automatically find one with the least interference.
Try changing the Hubitat to channel 25...if you can't change the WiFi channel on your Deco, it may be using channels other than 1, 6, and 11...which would cause interference with Zigbee channels 15 and 20.
I've seen stuff like this happen. Specifically, the hub will get in a state where it thinks the outlet is off when it is actually on (or vise versa). You ask to turn it off and the hub does nothing because it thinks it is already off. If you toggle on-off, things get right again.
I don't know what causes this. I suspect it is something in the hub or device drivers because it on affects certain devices and these are not necessarily devices that are far from the hub and I have far-away devices that never have trouble. I guess it could be an intermittent radio interference issue but I don't have any trouble controlling the devices when I go to troubleshoot these problems.
I switched it to 25 this morning. We'll see how things go. Thanks.
All of these issues can be traced to mesh inadequacies. Even the effect of radio interference is magnified when a mesh is less robust.
In my case, I have only two devices: a smart outlet on the other side of the room from the hub, and a 2nd smart outlet behind that wall in the next room. I don't have a 15-30 device "mesh", and both devices are well within the recommended 20ft max.
Especially the device that's just 10 ft away, I don't understand how it could possibly have a stronger mesh.
I think that the Sonoff plug is just weak as far as signal transmission goes. When one of them shows up in my route table it’s outcost is usually 0 and it’s only reporting that it’s repeating for itself.
Are you using the S40s? I tried to use the s40 lite but had lots of issues. I added 4 and they would work for a while, indicator light would go into fast flashing state and then they would stop responding. Physically turning them on they would start working again. They also caused some of my other zigbee devices to stop working. Tried changing zigbee channels with no change. I took them out and added in some Sengled and Third Reality with no issues at all.
Yes, S40 Lite. Maybe it's just a bad device. If the channel doesn't help, I'll try another brand.
More Devices equals stronger mesh.Two devices equals no redundancy or route options. Especially if the zigbee devices aren't great at repeating. I've had devices sitting right next to the hub that would never get used for repeaters and also had devices many feet away that would be the first hop. just how things work. Are sonoff good zigbee devices to begin with? Do a search on the forum for them and see what others say. Hang in there though because I use to think just like you're thinking now, only two devices well in range, what's the dang problem should work fine. from past experiences the HE hub doesn't seem to have the strongest radio's to just be able to rely on it to do all the work even if well in range of other devices.
Thanks Ken. I have read the same thing for the sonoff plugs, weak repeaters
Beware. some device do not operate on channel 25. I use 25 myself as it's farthest from the 2.4 wifi bands.
Channel 15 is likely the "most compatible", as when I come across devices with restricted channels, 15 is almost always supported
Unlikely. I've recently migrated from Smartthings. All of these devices were in the same locations and I did not experience these problems. On Hubitat, everything works most of the time.
You may argue that it is intermittent interference but if intermittent interference could break Zigbee like this, that's not very good engineering. Zigbee will retry until there is acknowledgment the message got through. If it can't get through, it's not intermittent interference and I should be seeing more widespread issues.
Nope. This would really take a mesh down. There's a limited number of retries. Memory says 2. So my opinion remains that intermittent interference, or a marginally-functional mesh underlie the symptoms that you describe.
Respectfully, you don't have enough information to make this determination with confidence. Let's say, for discussion's sake, it is not a mesh or severe interference issue, what else could we be dealing with here?
In my opinion very little else. What is your end-device to router ratio?
The 2.4 GHz spectrum around my house is very noisy. Both my zigbee meshes are very performant. On one of them, I have 85 devices, of which 20 are routers. On the other I have ~40 devices, of which 30 are routers.
Download the Hubitat app
