I wanted to see if anyone else has experienced strange issues with this plug. I bought mine from thesmartesthouse.com (great folks who were very patient in troubleshooting and sent me a replacement) and have had some issues that leave me scratching my head.
First off, I'm not plugging in anything too powerful and everything is well below the 10A limit. I have an audio receiver in one side, a subwoofer in the other and a simple rule that turns on the subwoofer if the power level of the receiver plug is above a certain amount.
I'll spare you the numerous experiments I ran but what I found to happen with 2 separate Zen plugs is if the receiver is plugged into the right side of the Zen plug, power monitoring will stop working on that side within 2-3 days. I can still control that side of the plug from the Hubitat and as soon as I power cycle that side, power monitoring will work for another 2-3 days. I switched the receiver to the left side of the plug and it's been stable for weeks now.
Another strange thing is that I never changed the LED behavior from the default which is 'on when switch on' but at some point, it decided that it wanted to behave as if the setting was 'LED on for 5 seconds' even though that's not what the setting is.
Lastly, the parent plug is reporting a power level high of 3232.5 and a power level low of -3244.8. This makes no sense to me as when powered on, the subwoofer has a max power level somewhere around 11 and the receiver has a max power level somewhere around 40.
Given that all of these things happened with 2 different ZEN25 plugs sent to me at different times, I'm inclined to think there is either a glitch in their firmware or a bug in the Hubitat driver.
Can anyone shed some light on this? Am I the only one having these issues?
I've not seen anything out of my double plug that is in use. But it's powering devices used very infrequently. Looking at the Grafana values for my double plug, I don't see anything out of the ordinary. I do have a spare one here. If I get time later today (and don't forget), I'll try to setup a test with a couple of devices that are used more often.
The only thing that stands out to me is that the devices you have connected can create a lot of RF noise. No idea if that could cause the plug to do weird things. Try providing some physical separation from the plug to the devices.
Do you have a way to verify the peak load generated by the amp and sub (other than the double plug)? An inexpensive kill-a-watt style meter might be helpful in diagnosing the issue.
@billmeek - Hmm, i didn't think about RF noise. The plug is currently located almost exactly in the middle between the subwoofer and receiver, roughly 2.5 feet away from them both. It is very close to a UPS though. RF noise wouldn't explain why I only have problems when the receiver is plugged into the right side??
I don't have a power meter at the moment but I will likely pick one up. I should also mention that the first Zen device reported a voltage high of 942.2V which I wouldn't think is possible from the UPS it is plugged into.
I've setup the spare plug and hooked the sub from my PC to the right side and one of my monitors on my primary PC to the left side double-plug for testing. I'm running Spotify on the desktop to make sure that audio is being played on the sub (with the added benefit of listening to some great old rock). The first strange thing I noted is that powering the right side (subwoofer) causes a brief flash on the monitor.
The music and video have been playing continuous until several minutes ago when I had to be on a call. The current reading of the plug are:
The other plug (in light usage) doesn't show odd powerHigh and powerLow values like that. I'll have to do a little more testing when time permits.
That's interesting that your subwoofer caused a similar spike in the power readings. I've noticed that sometimes the LEDs on the side of the plug my sub is plugged into will flash purple which the manual says is a power usage of over 1200W - well beyond the capabilities of my small sub. I'm going to buy an electricity monitor like you suggested to see if there really is a power spike.
I appreciate you taking the time to test things out. Please do let me know what you find!
6 Hours without a glitch in the readings after removing the subwoofer. So I've added another monitor in place of the sub to see if it'll cause issues. By the way, these monitors draw considerably more power than the sub showed. The sub showed around 7.4 and the monitors pull 36.7 each.
Receiver in right side, subwoofer in left - baseline problem.
Receiver in right side, nothing in left - same problem, eliminates sub as cause.
Small LED lamp in right side (power reading around 7), nothing in left plug. 3 days of occasionally powering the outlet off and on - no problem.
Moved plug back to media center. Plugged the TV into the right side, sub in left side. Much higher power readings (up to 300). LED was mostly dark blue, flickered to light blue occasionally which makes sense given increased power levels. Lasted ~2 days before power monitoring broke.
Plugged TV into the left side with subwoofer in right side - no problems for 2+ days.
Plugged receiver into the left side, sub still in right side. No problems for 3 days. Power reading for receiver still~50 like before.
Plugged receiver into the right side and sub in left, returning to baseline. Power monitoring broke in less than 24 hours.
I didn't re-run all of the experiments with the new plug but I can confirm that having the receiver plugged into the right side broke power monitoring within 2 days whereas I'm going on 3+ weeks with no issues with the receiver in the left side.
Given the results I think you may understand why I was thinking the issue lies with either the Hubitat driver or the Zen firmware. Another possibility is that both the TV and receiver are network connected devices and occasionally draw small amounts of power while in standby mode but that wouldn't explain why I only have problems when they are plugged into the right side.
I did order an electricity monitor just to see if there are any spikes from the receiver or sub - will report back with results.
I bought an electricity meter and hooked it up to the right side of my Zooz plug for the past 4 days or so with the sub plugged into the meter. Even though the right side of the Zooz plug's LED was occasionally flashing purple (the manual says flashing purple is a load over 1200W) the meter never recorded anything more than 24.8W.
I'm going to move the meter over to the left side where the receiver is plugged in. In the past couple of days the left side's LED has been flashing blue intermittently. I'll report back with results in a few days.
I almost threw away my hubitat since it has been at a crawl and skipping automation since December (very stable before that). I thought a release slowed it down, but I was getting hundreds of updates per minute from this plug, despite my settings to report a 10watt threshold or 10 minutes. I have turned off everything and I get far less reports. My hub has sped up again. I will have to check again as the purpose of mine is to check if phone is charging which it doesn't do now.
@billmeek Very interesting that a subwoofer causes issues with yours also. If you have time could you please try the subwoofer in the opposite side of the plug you had it in before? Also, do the status LEDs obey whatever setting you give them in the Hubitat?
I put the electricity meter on the left side of the plug the other day with the receiver. Strangely enough the meter has indicated a max reading of 8W for the receiver whereas the Zooz event page in the Hubitat shows an average of around 40. To add to my confusion, I haven't seen flashing purple LEDs on the sub side for the past couple of days either.
In the end I'm happy that the device and rules are working the way I want, I just don't understand why it only works correctly with my devices plugged in a certain way.
@ajones My plug does seem to be rather chatty as well. I have seen some slowness and automation skipping since December as well. It's unpredictable and usually clears up on its own though a reboot of the Hubitat will fix things for sure. I have my power reporting set for the defaults and I am also getting a ton of events.
Just switched the plugs around to put the sub on the other side and reset the states. I'll let you know if I see any weird values.
I've never changed the light settings from the default and given where the plug is located (suspended on the backside of my desk), I can't see it without quite a bit of effort. So continually watching it for changes right now is a no-go.
As I was typing the above, the double plug 'power high' just jumped to an unrealistic value:
That's with the sub on, but no audio playing, and the left side (where it's now connected) has shown power reported ranging from 5.5 to 5.7. The other side still has one of the PC monitors connected.
I did just watch the plug for 3 minutes and didn't see anything other than the standard blue of both sides being on.
@agnes.zooz
My guess is that subwoofers should be added to the list of items not recommended for use with the double plug.
@billmeek Thanks for taking the time to run some experiments with your plug - much appreciated!
@agnes.zooz Do you have any idea why power monitoring would break after 1-3 days if my receiver is plugged into the right side of the plug (with nothing in the left) but no problems if the same receiver is plugged in the left side (with or without a subwoofer in the right side)? I can't make any sense of it. I don't think it's a faulty Zooz device, I had the exact same behavior with two of them.
We haven't been able to replicate this behavior and have never seen it before so it's really hard to say what's happening here. We'll keep trying to replicate the problem and will let you know as soon as we get to the bottom of this!
For my case I had a TV on the right side and some leds behind the tv on the left side. My automation would turn on the leds if my TV is on (power reached a certain level). After 2-3 days the power monitoring and the led (blue on the zen25) to know if the plug is on would change to not monitoring and the led would turn off by itself.
I inverted the position (TV on the left, leds on the right) and my setup is working for more than a week. The only issue is the blue led on the left side is off although the tv still has electricity.
It seems to be a firmware problem in the Zen25. Is there any new update for it?
2.0 is currently the latest available update but we haven't seen this issue before so I'm not sure whether updating the firmware would be a good solution. I'd recommend getting in touch with our support to go over some troubleshooting here.
