This device set itself to fire on 2023-11-07 11PM , luckily I was at home and smoke alarm kicked in.
It wasn’t even turned on, havent been on since weeks. It was the switch for that lava lamp you see in one picture.
I sent the pics to Sonoff immideately, asking for a response, but the didnt reply with a proper response except a refund offer.
I’m done with them, removed all gear next day. What platic do they use something like this can even happen?
This is not good definitely, but why the circuit breaker didn’t turn off electricity?
Maybe you should check your installations.
Why should the breaker turn off?
The arc required to light that on fire should have triggered a breaker overload, arc fault or ground fault. That’s why.
Well I’m not electrician, but I think it should. This is my guess based on my experience. I think this happened probably due to overload.
I had a situation with one of my kitchen outlets. It’s a dumb outlet but I had and have connected to it owen and dishwasher. As it is in kitchen element no one pay much attention to it. Until one day I plugged smart plug in it. Someone turned on owen and dishwasher at the same time and aquara plug was toasted and it turn off electricity. As I got info in ha I saw what happend.
Current was way to high and smart plug burned out. But the breaker didn’t go off.
In my opinion breaker should go off in case of overload.
But you don’t know what electrician did. You can just hope that he done his job properly, but often this is not the case.
Probably wasn’t an arc nor a straight short. Failed component, heating up, started smoldering, etc. It doesn’t take much current for this to happen, even an amp or two at 240V is entirely sufficient to start a fire.
Sonoffs have been doing this for ages. Looks like they still haven’t managed to make their stuff safe after all these years.
Good decision.
The cheapest of cheap, no safety checks, no certifications (or only fake ones), the cheapest of cheap components. All that will inevitably lead to catastrophic failure modes like this one. You’re not the only one, it has happened before (pretty often, just Google for burnt Sonoff).
They do, that’s what they’re designed for. Overload for the wires in your walls. Because that’s all what breakers are supposed to protect you from. Fires from overloaded wires. They can’t know if some connected device is failing and overloading itself.
He said it was off. Probably some failing component, entirely posssible it wasn’t pulling enough to trip a breaker.
In my case the problem was that breaker didn’t go off. And we used this for years. I changed outlet for another dumb outlet and I saw on it and on the wires that they were burned. Wires was burned at the end and outlet was burned little bit more.
But the breaker never went off.
As the overload protection goes I trust more smart plugs and outlets than some electrician that did wiring. No matter that those devices are made in china. Till now never failed in case of overload protection.
They don’t have to. Breakers do not protect your devices. This is very important. They can’t, they don’t know whether or not some smart plug is overloading itself. They protect the wires. That’s all they do and that’s all they were designed to do. If your smart plug toasts itself with less amps than what the breaker is sized for (which is very likely), then they won’t trip. That’s perfectly normal. The not-normal thing is your plug burning because of overload.
Maybe you should have someone check your wiring then. Things like that should be foolproof. Smart plug overload protection is usually pretty crappy and should not be relied on.
Here is the power draw of my house from the time it happened - nothing unusual, I think no arc was involved, more a faulty component or something.
I guess its hard to find out the root cause, unless one expert checks the burnt device (which I expected Sonoff to do - but hey).
They probably already know what failed.
I had aquara plug rated on 10 amps. Current was way over that when the plug cute off electricity and basically burn off. I put another plug rated on 16 amps and when you turn everything on plug disconnects electricity as current is way to high but as it is 16 amps plug it didnt burned off.
Maybe you should have someone check your wiring then. Things like that should be foolproof. Smart plug overload protection is usually pretty crappy and should not be relied on.
I understand what you want to say but my experience with it is not like that. No matter what it should be rechecked but I want to say that some brands are pretty reliable in case of power overloading.
That looks really ugly. Definitely a whole house buster. Glad that you were home to see it on time!
Power draw from this outlet or generally power draw?
I found out my issue just by pure accident. If I hadn’t install smart plug on this outlet no one will know till this day that there is some problem.
It could ended just like in your case or maybe worse.
Wow, that’s terrifying! I only have 3 Sonoff smart plugs that are Zigbee that control my curtain motors, but if they go up in flames then the curtains go up in flames and the house goes up in flames. The curtains would probably be on fire by the time my smoke alarms detected an issue.
Thats for the complete house.
I don’t think you will get to the bottom of it by this. It could be faulty plug, but it also could be installation not properly done or secured by the electrician. It will not be the first or the last time, as people just don’t care. They will do job take the money and run. Till you find out that they mess something up… well its not their problem any more.
Unfortunately, isn’t that the truth…
No it can’t. It’s physically impossible for the electrical installation to do something like that to a plugged in device, regardless of how bad the wiring or install is. The only way to externally cause this to a plug that is just plugged in and not in use, is to supply a significant overvoltage over the line. In a single phase install, this is not possible. In a three-phase install, there is one single super rare and super obscure fault that can cause this and that could be attributed to a bad install, a loss of neutral, which would put 400V on every single outlet and electric circuit of the entire home and immediately destroy every electrical device in the entire house. I think the OP would have noticed.
No, this is 100% on the plug. Not as if Sonoff would care. As said, these things burning down is a pretty common occurance sadly.
