Ghost activities or smart-home-virus?

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For some days now I watch the phenomen that lights are switch on without any switch beeing touched and no automation had been triggered.

In at least two cases a number of bulbs/lights had been switched on. But not all lights at the same time but during 30 or 40 seconds two up to four light had been switched on.

I deeply checked the activity log in HA and also the latest run of each automation without finding anything causing this. The log showed the lights had been switched on, but no switch or automation did anything.

Spooky!

So you might think it might be caused by a third party app from the light manufacture. But the lights that had been switched were from different manufactures with diffenrent apps (tuya, philips, sonoff).

Only homeassistant (and the Google Home App) is connecting these different services or devices.

Can anyone help me how to find the root cause and fix it?

Otherwise I might have to shut down my whole smart home as my wife was never happy about this “not so smart” home and her feeling of losing control. And now with these ghost activities for a good reason.

Hoping for the best!

Dietmar

2

Are these all Zigbee? (ghost ons are a known thing for zigbee bulbs in firmware load, or poor connectivity settings.)

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TLDR: Same here, but I don’t know why [g].

Yes, that’s what I’m dealing with today. Certain lights I’ll find on when returning to them. But I was toying with a lot, and there also appears to be update time for IOS and AppleHome.

Poking around a bit myself for the past hour, I just re-installed 2 bulbs in MQTT to see if that stops the random issues. I also yesterday had changed the controller for the (14) Lutron Aurora rotary dimmers (each used an automation, but I wanted to see how the pyscript approach would work here).

It could be the recent update to MQTT or the OS. update I don’t know yet. Just monitoring it all. (99% of my many bulbs are Phillips Hue, fwiw). If you said you used ZHA (not MQTT) I’d look towards the OS update.

4

That’s the funny thing: only the Philips Bulbs are Zigbee, the others are Wifi from two different manufactures with two different apps.

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Hi, have you checked the device activity history?

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It shows what controlled it.

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That was the frustrating aspect. . . the activity history wouldn’t reveal anything about the random activities, only ones an automation or physical action initiated.

After the AppleTV & 2 HomePod mini’s completing their updates, and several reboots later (including the network), the problems cleared up. Not sure whether to blame at the Apple updates or the experimenting with Home-Assistant-Matter-Hub (since removed).

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Sure I did in detail. That is what I meant writing this:

I deeply checked the activity log in HA and also the latest run of each automation without finding anything causing this. The log showed the lights had been switched on, but no switch or automation did anything.

So it really looks like this is coming out of nowhere.

8

So TBC: you have lights that are integrated with different integrations/protocols and from both sides the seem to randomly switch on/off?

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My guess is bad connectivity or bumps in the power supply.
You might have a device on your power grid that makes noise and that cause the bulbs to reboot.

10

Hmm … interesting approach. If that would be the case there is no change for me to verify or prevent that …

But: This issue happens only with a few bulbs in the living-room, but even not with all bulbs there.

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@Nick4 Yes, exactly that is the issue.

But only with a few (not all) bulbs in the living-room, not in other rooms.

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Does it happen with the same bulbs every time and are those from the same brand/type (or not)?

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Try removing the bulbs from Google Home temporarily and see if that has any effect.

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My guess too is problems with power. I disagree there’s no cure: look into the startup settings for the bulbs. Avoid ‘On’ and pick the choice to restore to the previous state.

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Okay, you’re right. Just checked this with the ceiling light and it had already been set to “off after power-off”.

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@Nick4 Not exactly, but the celing light (Kesen/sonoff) was involved in most cases. Other involved manufactures are Osram and Philips.

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My point was: if it’s always the same bulbs, you could think in the direction of firmware and power spikes on the net.

If you have a smart plug, or any other device, that shows voltages you could look in the history if there is a relation in the behavior of your bulbs.

Also, take @fleskefjes his advice into consideration.

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Do you have automations targeting e.g. a label or the area that might be responsible? Maybe the log isn’t always complete. Have you checked what automations/scripts ran at the time the bulbs did their magic?