I haven’t bothered. It’s a A$25 plug. The effort to claim is probably is more than it’s worth. If I feel particularly bothered I might see what they say.
Mine failed after nine months and they would not replace them, only offer me 50% off new plugs. I declined and bought some others
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I think there’s early indications that these plugs are going to fall into the “cheap and looked really promising but hard to justify them if they only last 12months-ish category”…along with the Kogans and Brilliants I’ve been through.
Mine have been pretty good so far but well I’ll wait and see…
My three under light occasional load are up to four months … fingers crossed…
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I also own a couple of these plugs. I bought them with ESPHome pre-flashed and updated their firmware as well as renamed them to proper names.
I’ve been using them for lamps, tablet charger, electric blanket and also for power monitor a bar fridge.
Anyway, yesterday, I put one of them on the main GPO of my servers to monitor their power usage (before that I flashed it so it turns back on after 10 seconds of reboot, just in case there’s a power failure). However, after an hour or so, the servers and switches restarted randomly.
Then I removed the api timeout (which restarts the ESP after of 15 minutes of no HA connectivity) and confidently/proudly put it back there. Again today it restarted everything…
The number of full restarts that I’ve been having since yesterday is probably more that what I had in the past year!
Anyway, I am trying to find the cause of it or just get rid of it on the servers’ GPO.
Edit - constant usage is less than 200 watts which is less than 10% of plug’s limit (assuming it’s a 10A plug?).
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I like to add uptime sensors to most of my ESPHome devices to keep an eye on restarts…
- platform: uptime
name: "${friendly_name} Uptime Sensor"
update_interval: 5s
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On Athom plugs uptime is pre-programmed in their device (and hence yaml file). And I see the restarts on the uptime logs too.
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Interesting, I don’t get a cumulative chart like that. I get to choose intervals and period, like this:
[A little bit off topic] But I can see in your case the chart overflows after a day (24h x 60m x 60s = 86,400s) which makes sense. Showing 6 months history here means you must be having a large database size. Nice!
Edit - I suppose if you update your firmware with newer esphome (potentially later than 2022.11) it gives a correct device class to uptime sensor and it will show it like mine.
I don’t see my ESPHome as listing any update being available.
My HA Core is 2023.1.0
No matter. It might be something to do with a change to the way HA history data is displayed and untreated to the plugs themselves.
I’m tracking energy consumption for a range of appliances. These plugs seem to do a good job of that. I know nothing about database sizes - I let the system worry about that stuff!
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Two out of five of these died, but I managed to repair both of them, so here’s a report to warn others about the quality, usage, and give some guidance for fixing them in case you already have them. I have the EU version of the ESPHome flashed plug. I ordered 3 times from Athom’s AliExpress site so far:
- 2021-12: 2x original version: [1] power for my 3d printer, most of the time in the OFF mode, [2] washing machine, was always ON, used for notification when the washing finished based on power consumption
- 2022-03: 2x original version: [3] used for an espresso machine (ON for about 20 minutes a day), [4] desktop PC, always ON, used for power consumption reports
- 2022-09: 1x version 2 (more accurate): [5] replacement for [4]
Plug [4] died first after a power outage, it never turned back on, got hot and never showed up on WiFi. This happened just after 6 months of usage.
Plug [2] died just a few days ago after a bit more than a year.
Both of these were the ones that were always ON. This was a good clue for the repair.
Disassembly
I found this similar looking plug and followed the disassembly instructions: Damage free disassembly of an BSD33 EU Smart Plug | Blakadder's Smarthome Shenanigans – for me it definitely was not damage free. The case of these Athom plugs seem ultrasonically welded, and took some force to crack them open and the pipe wrench left a lot of teeth marks. I also slightly cracked the plastic here and there, but it’s not a structural or safety issue.
I reassembled it with hot glue around the edge to make it easy to take it apart again if necessary. It would look better with superglue inside the ridge.
Repair
It was not too hard to notice that the low power capacitor went bad. Not sure if it blew up or just slowly expanded, but it was clearly dead. For reference it was a ShiCaXon brand, 10V rated, 470 uF capacity one.
I replaced it with a 16V 220 uF low-ESR (I did not have the proper capacity at hand), and the one I fixed 3-4 days ago works reliably since then and the one I fixed today seem to work as well.
I assume this capacitor is used for the step-down power transformer that runs the ESP chip and the relay, and it is either very low quality and/or probably not low-ESR which is necessary for surviving the rippling that these need to withstand from the AC source.
Neither of these broken plugs damaged the device plugged into them, they failed OFF, disconnecting the power. So that’s good at least.
I think with this repair these plugs will keep working for a long time, but I will definitely not buy more. I suspect with less load on them (being ON rarely and not powering the relay) these would fail a lot later. Not sure if they made any changes on the “v2” version, but I definitely won’t be buying more of them.
I hope this report is helpful. I wonder if they use the same components in the other plug types, and whether the refreshed version fixed this or they will keep failing after this cap dies?
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This is a great write up! Thanks for taking the time to share it!
I’ve had issues with 2 plugs as well. 1 plug is recently getting warm and is not available through ESPHOME anymore. My other plug also wasn’t connecting to wifi, I couldn’t access it anymore. Then I left it unconnected for a while and all of a sudden I could recconnect it.
I’ve then updated the firmware and the plug has been working ever since. (Couple of weeks now)
I’m using my plugs for switching on and off lights in our rooms and outside, so nothing special with high currents.
The plugs are very easy to use, but I’m not sure if I would buy more again (bought 4 first, then bought another 8).
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How did you calculate a functional voltage and capacity value to use instead of the original one ?
You can use a capacitor which has a higher rated voltage as I did there. It just means it can withstand that potential difference before its insulation breaks down, it won’t make anything operate at a higher voltage.
As for the capacity it’s best to match the original one, but a lot of times they are used as a buffer to avoid voltage drop and keep the microprocessor stable when it uses too much power suddenly, like when it boots up and connects to WiFi. So there is some leeway in the design for smaller or bigger capacity ones. In this case it seems 220uF was enough and both repaired units still run in a stable way and the power readings stayed the same too. But this should be in general avoided unless you know what you’re doing.
The rated temperature should be also similar (the original is was 105°C), and as I mentioned try to get a low-ESR version, it might help long term too. Besides they are usually higher quality.
Also pay attention to the dimensions, specifically here the limiting factor is the distance between the legs of the capacitor and its diameter. The case can fit a taller one than the original one included.
I’ve had 2 out of the 4 au v2 plugs I bought die too in less than 4 months, unfortunately one was on the fridge and everything spoilt. its disappointing that they died so quick but I guess you get what you pay for…
I was hesitant to put one on the fridge but I really wanted to see the power usage and if a door had been left open etc… next time I might modify one to just be a power monitor and not a switch
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I’ve forwarded a link to this thread to Athom.
Perhaps they’ll pay attention to the feedback and try to address issues.
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Thanks @wattmatters & @Mahko_Mahko for pointing me to this thread.
I wasn’t aware up until this morning that they weren’t AU certified (I honestly don’t know why I didn’t look for that, when I do for all the other things I consider for my HA setup).
I’ve currently got 6 of these around the house, with two more coming. They are used for various things, mainly for power monitoring to be used in automations (i.e. reminder to empty the washing machine, dryer, clean the coffee machine after use, etc.).
The only place they are used as actual switches is on a webcam (to monitor the dogs when we leave the house), and on a lamp.
Will continue watching this thread, and for uptime issues!
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Honestly, how are consumers meant to know? They are sold here from a local supplier and have Australian pins.
I do like their connectivity reliability and ease of integration with Home Assistant and power measurement seems pretty good. But I have confined them to monitoring duties only.
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