You kind of need to fix your WiFi channel if you have Zigbee networks and have planned your installation to prevent overlapping and interference with them, otherwise it’s free to wander all over the place and do what it wants.
There used to be a requirement from Wiser regarding Wifi channels, but it seems to be it has been removed from the article where it was listed (or the article replaced in 2021):
The requirement was not really known, but the Wiser Hub required WiFi channel 1, 6 or 11 for operation.
@jamiebennett, I tried to post above an article about a vulnerability what the Kasa smart plugs had. One plug was enough to take down all the other plugs on the same network. There was a set of commands to turn on an off the plugs as a group, and it could be stormed between devices. So one started and the others were joining in also sending similar commands.
This issue was local network related as well, and was deemed a vulnerability.
Agreed, which is why in this case you need the secret key to be able to establish a connection with the Wiser hub. This key should only be known to the homeowner.
At Schneider Electric we take cyber security very serious which is why all out connected products go through a rigours security evaluation both internally and externally.
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Outage just now (8:21 am). I noticed a little less than an hour later
Flashing red light on the hub. I pressed the setup button got flashing green light. Pressed setup again and got solid red light. Shortly after the light went green and back online.
I received an outage notification email from my ping monitor last night, advising that the Wiser hub was unreachable for 2 minutes 31 seconds
My setup:
Router: BT Smart Hub 2
Mesh - No
Connected on 2.4ghz channel 11 (auto)
BT Smart Hub 2 is approx 2 metres away from the Wiser Hub, with 2 brick walls inbetween
1 x other Zigbee network for HA purposes using Sonoff ZB Bridge as coordinator running Tasmota
IPs: DHCP assigned
Hub Connections:
House construction - brick walls (1990’s 3 bed bungalow)
Total of 18 things connected (12 on Wi-Fi as mix of 5gz and 2.4ghz, 6 via ethernet).
I was unable to check the hub at the time of the drop out as I was asleep! I’m currently still monitoring throughout the day today, so any more issues I can check the hub status at the time and see if there is a red light on or not. Whatever happened last night for the short duration managed to rectify itself with no hub restart required. @jamiebennett - not sure if it’s worth raising a support ticket and uploading my hub logs for this minor incident? No schedules were active, nobody was interacting with the hub via the Wiser app etc, the system was effectively ‘idle’ other than my ping monitor sending a ping every 3 seconds.
Hi Scoff,
Feel free to raise a ticket though Zendesk but rest assured I’m collating each and every report and the team is looking into it now. I’ll keep updating here if we find anything.
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Thanks @jamiebennett . I’m just wondering if this takes the HA Integration and the frequency that it polls the hub out of the equation, if there are dropouts with a standard setup (no HA Integration and no TRV’s in the Zigbee network, just the hub and room stat). I’ll raise a ticket and upload the hub logs in case it reveals a reason for the drop in my scenario at least as this may possible shed some light by taking the HA integration out of the picture…
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Small wifi dropouts are fine as long as they recover quickly. There should be no impact to normal operation like schedules, heating, etc. The ones we are investigating now are dropouts for a much longer duration.
Just got home again to steady red light on the hub. Again, I pressed setup to get flashing green light then again to get red and within 30 seconds it had connected again.
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Good feedback, thanks. Pressing the Setup button puts the device into a SoftAP mode (so you can connect directly to it with your phone). As it comes out of this mode it resets the WiFi stack which it seems remedies whatever state the gateway comms is in. We are narrowing it down with all your help, thanks.
Can people who have experienced longer dropouts confirm if the red light is flashing or solid during this period?
Actually, after the light went green the hub was not responding to ping nor could the Wiser app connect to it. I pressed Setup twice again, and it went to flashing red, then steady green, then took a few minutes before it would respond to ping.
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As per my 4 hour disconnection the other night, the red light was on solid for about half an hour, before changing to flashing red. After 4 hours waiting to see if it would recover itself, I did a router reboot to see if that would bring it back, but it didn’t, so I gave up and power cycled the hub. I will try the setup button ‘reset’ method next time this happens to see if that gets it back online.
During the time it was offline, the hub was also unavailable from the app, as it was on the previous occasion I was able to check this and it was not visible in my router connected IP table, although it was still showing in the DHCP reservation table. As expected really, as it had dropped off the WiFi.
I should add the old phone I placed next to the hub and setup a ping monitor for was still responding during this period, so I think that rules out environmental factors at play.
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Just got home again to steady red light on the hub.
Hi - hope you don’t mind me joining in the conversation - I work on this project at Schneider:
I believe flashing red means “not connected to wifi” but solid red means “not connected to the cloud”.
@dunxd - Does your home router believe the hub is still connected when in this state? (could you check the router’s web UI?) I’m wondering if the hub has simply lost its IP address and the router has not given one back to it. (DHCP and all that?)
If you can’t ping the hub but it is solid red this may indicate just a lack of IP address? (and hence any IP route to / from the hub).
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@jeptech Thank you for joining. The more interaction we have with Wiser/Schneider, the more likely we are to solve this issue.
Yes, according to the Wiser HubR LED behaviour guide, the hub light flashing red is the indicator of the hub having disconnected from WiFi. The guide says that solid red indicates either a firmware upgrade or connection to the Wiser cloud has been lost.
In my case, it was solid red for about half an hour before transitioning to flashing red. It was offline the whole time though and unreachable from Home Assistant or the app.
Thanks @robertwigley - we’d like to know a way to reproduce the “solid red” condition easily so we can investigate this but it has so far proved elusive. We know from the reports on this thread that it can happen but we don’t know how to force it. We’re looking for patterns but it appears to be just a waiting game. We’re also inspecting failure modes at the stack level. We’ll keep you posted.
In the meantime, if anyone observes this solid red setup LED and can let us know whether their wi-fi router believes the hub is still connected, we’d very much appreciate the heads up. Thanks in adance.
According to the logs, my WiFi network detected the Hub disconnected from the network at 12:32:05.
My Home Assistant monitor detected the Hub as disconnected at 12:18:56. It makes sense that the wifi system doesn’t detect wifi disconnection immediately, as it can’t tell the difference between no transmissions because there are none to make and actually being offline.
My WiFi network reported the Hub reconnected at 12:47:59.
My Home Assistant monitoring detected the Hub as connected 12:47:55.
Unfortunately my DHCP server logging only retains logs for a short period and I missed when the Hub would have made a new request.
Note that I have configured DHCP to issue the same IP address to the Hub by its MAC address so I can monitor it. I don’t see any way to locally configure a static IP address on the Hub which would allow removal of DHCP as a potential element in this issue.
I’ll have to catch it during the next outage. When I do I eill
I have configured DHCP to issue the same IP address to the hub by its MAC address. Is there any way to set the hub to use a static IP address so it doesn’t use DHCP?
Thank you - that’s all very helpful.
Unfortunately, there is currently no way for users to configure the IP address statically. However, it is something we can do internally to aid our testing and track down what might be going wrong.
Unfortunately, we don’t have a consistent way of forcing the condition and it is more or less a waiting game. My router did not show the hub as connected, as per my previous post on this a few back and also further back still (I know there are a lot to go through on here).