I know this is not directly related to this integration, but there is a lot of discussion on here regarding the hub disconnections, and rightly so, as this does affect the usefulness of the integration (especially if you are using Home Assistant presence detection to switch Away Mode on and off) and the utility of the standalone Wiser system as a whole.
Well, having had the hub installed for just under a week now and having setup some monitoring (a ping binary sensor and automation to notify based on the numeric_state of the minutes_since_last_update attribute of sensor.wiser_hub_heating_operation_mode changing to 1 i.e. above 0) based on the previous disconnection discussions in this thread, I saw my first disconnection while out for dinner last night. I returned home to find the hub light flashing red. Fortunately I had been alerted to the disconnection an hour or so before getting home based on my sensors and automations. If I hadn’t I would have been completely unaware and probably would have woken up this morning to a cold house and no hot water, as Away Mode had been activated before the hub disconnected. Consequently, Away Mode was never automatically switched off when we returned home as Home Assistant couldn’t connect to the hub to send it the instruction to switch it off.
According to the Wiser HubR LED behaviour guide, the hub light flashing red is actually the indicator of the hub having disconnected from WiFi, not solid red as others have been suggesting. The guide says that solid red indicates either a firmware upgrade or connection to the Wiser cloud has been lost.
While in the flashing red state, the Wiser Home app was also giving an error saying it was unable to connect to or find the hub. The only way I could get the hub to reconnect to my WiFi was power cycling it. If this is a regular occurance, the utility of the Wiser system as a whole is seriously downgraded.
@dunxd is right to point out need to plan Zigbee and WiFi channels to avoid interference and I planned out my installations using the Zigbee and WiFi coexistence guide. However, you should also be aware that it’s recommended to keep your ZHA or Zigbee2MQTT network on one of the channels that also supports ZLL (Zigbee Light Link), to avoid problems with some Zigbee devices.
Note: use a ZLL channel: 11, 15, 20, or 25 to avoid problems
We live in a detached house a decent distance from neighbours, so shouldn’t be getting too much interference from their WiFi networks. I have two other Zigbee networks in addition to the Wiser Zigbee network and specifically set these all up so as to avoid interference from each other. My Hue hub is on Zigbee channel 11, my Zigbee2MQTT Home Assistant Add-on is on channel 15, my Wiser Zigbee is on channel 14 (I wanted to put this on channel 13, but as per my previous post a few back about Zigbee channels, there is currently no way to manually set this) and my WiFi is on channel 11. I’m using a decent Netgear Nighthawk router running dd-wrt and not the Virgin Hub, which set to modem only mode.
Based on this, there should be no interference from these devices competing with each other. However, unfortunately, the 2.4GHz radio spectrum is also congested by Bluetooth, DECT phones and can even be affected by such things as microwaves and a plethora of other wireless devices that operate in this range. The only surefire way to detect interference properly seems to be using something like Wi-Spy and Chanalyzer, which I don’t have access to.
My best guess though, based on all the above and given that so many people are reporting disconnections, although I would be interested to hear how many of these are flashing red light as opposed to solid red, is that there is something flawed in the Wiser hub firmware that is causing these and not environmental factors at play here.
I’m not sure what my next step will be with this yet, other than monitor it for a while and open a support ticket with Wiser (they will be getting fed up with me as I’ve already contacted them a few times about various things), but I am already considering not using the spare SwitchBot Bot as a way of power cycling the boiler isolator switch (as I mentioned in my previous post about this) and hardwiring something more permanant (probably a Zigbee relay rather than something like a Sonoff which uses WiFi and is inherently less reliable) directly to the power supply for the Wiser hub, assuming, of course, that I decide to keep this. I could still return it to Amazon for a refund as I am well within my 30 days return window. However, returning it would be a pity, as other than this problem, which I may be able to work around dependent on how frequent it is, the Wiser system so far seems to be excellent.
