ZigBee plugs turning on and off randomly

Hi all, I purchased some ZigBee plugs back in Feb/Mar this year and they worked as expected until sometime around late last month as they started to turn themselves on and off quite randomly.
I then started troubleshooting the issue however I haven’t got anywhere with it so far so I thought I’d ask for some assistance here.

Details as follows:
• Hardware - Telstra Smart Power Plug model SZ-ESW01-AU manufactured by Sercomm
• Driver - Generic Zigbee Outlet

Troubleshooting performed:

  1. Deleted and re-added some of the devices
  2. Checked for any other rules which could be using the same device but there is no other than what I had already been using before the issue emerged
  3. Unplugged all appliances from the plugs and let them run without any load
  4. Powered off my ST hub and Hue Bridge only leaving the HE hub and RM4 Pro running
  5. Plugged devices into different power points around the house
  6. Added a TP link HS110 to HE today so I’ll monitor this one to see if it will get affected next time the issue occurs
  7. Added 4 spare plugs (same brand and model) to HE and all 4 got affected by the issue despite being brand new
  8. Confirmed that no other device or appliance from the same electrical circuit is affected as the issue occurs
  9. Checked the manufacturer’s website for firmware updates but they appear to have discontinued the device and no support is available

I set a Basic Rule for each plug in order to monitor them individually and they all appear to get turned off at the same time:


I find it really bizarre that they worked fine for around 2 months then this started occurring – I can’t think of any recent changes from a electrical and Zigbee network perspective which could be impacting this.

I’ve exhausted my option here I think so any suggestion would be much appreciated.

Do you have these outlets integrated with Amazon Alexa? If so, please make sure the “Alexa Hunches” feature is disabled. Do you have any other integrations with external systems? Like Google Home, Apple Homebridge, etc.? Integrations like these are often the source of seemingly random behavior.

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No other integrations at all, they are only managed by HE - I even turned off mt ST hub and Hue bridge just in case but the issue still persisted.

If you go into each of the outlets device details pages, near the bottom your see an “in use by” section. There must be a common app that they are all being controlled by. Perhaps all part of a common Hubitat Groups and Scenes app’s group or scene? And then that group/scene is being controlled by some other app or integration?

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Good point - I checked a few but nothing really stood out to me.

I created the group 'All plugs' after the issue started in order to troubleshoot it - The other stuff is just dashboards and the actual rules which the plug is part of.

Can you disable all those groups, dashboards, and automations (Rule Machine, Basic Rule)? If the random events stop, then it indicates that the issue is caused by automations and isn’t a hardware issue per se.

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I'll try that and will report back over the next week - Thank you.

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You said you were using basic rules.

Are you doing something like
Turn on at 1:00 PM, wait until 9:00 PM and turn off?

If so, check the rules to see if you have multiple ResumeX entries in the scheduled jobs.

Using that format in a basic rule, I was getting odd results.

I changed mine from what I typed above to
Turn on at 1:00 PM, wait 480 minutes and turn off.

They've been working fine since making that change.

No, there was no rules of that kind at all - I also checked over all other possible rules which could interfere with this but I couldn't find any.

Thanks for your input.

As a last resort, I turned off HE and monitored the plugs - Surprisingly it still happened so this points to a hardware problem.

I also purchased some Kasa KP115 plugs (wifi) and also set notification rules for them - None of them have tripped so far and neither have the Telstra ones.

I honestly can't make sense of this but at least the issue is now resolved.

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