We had a power outage yesterday evening and post-outage, three of my four devices came back on line. I figured that the host computer needed to be properly rebooted to get the fourth one working – I did that today and nothing.
The fourth device is a SonOff S20. So, I accessed the Home Assistant web interface, clicked on ESP Home, clicked the three dots on the device, and selected Install. I went through that entire procedure, but again nothing.
At this point, I grabbed a spare S20, did the same steps as above, and it worked properly. So, my question is simply this: Could the first S20 be dead? Note that the S20 has a nightlight plugged into it, and the nightlight is dead post blackout.
Very probable. The surge from the outage could have fried the electronics. I have 6 S20’s but I have whole house UPS and surge protection at ever panel and sub-panel. I have lost alot of Z-wave devices due to surges/outages and why I gut the surge protection.
Thanks for the reply. Once I read it, I said to myself “I would have sworn that I had installed a whole house surge suppressor.” I looked,and sure enough, it’s there. Figuring that you know of what you speak, I did a tad of research and found that the useful life of these devices is only several years and mine (once I did some more digging) was installed two decades ago. Oops! Time to replace it.
I have customer that had (notice “had”) one of those devices on their panel. Lightning hit a tree across the street. Every electronic device in their house that was in any way connected to a wire (either the grid, an Ethernet cable, an analog phone line, a TV cable) was fried. Fridge, freezer, oven, air conditioner unit coil windings and contactors all melted.
The Siemens “whole house protector” was vaporized. Literally. The box itself was essentially gone, with just a black mark on the panel remaining with some dangling bits of melted copper wire.
The only good thing to help in case of lightning strikes is a darned good solid copper grounding rod, sunk several feet into the ground. It saved our home almost twenty years ago. Lightning skipped all the taller trees, and struck at the grounding cable on the side of our house. Black scorch marks everywhere, plastic utility boxes (phone and cable) blown off the house, and several pieces of lost equipment inside. But no other significant damage, thankfully. The grounding rod had directed most of the impact into the earth.