It will only take 20 minutes

Hardware
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Figured I could share a little story about how a 20 minute “shove a Shelly 1 in the switch box” job turned into about 3 and a half hours of cursing and rethinking life decisions.

Yesterday I was discussing some home automation stuff with some co-workers, and I was bragging about how reliable and “trouble free” my zwave has been for nearly 3 years. Home Assistant is of course, at the forefront to that. The topic of Shelly came up, and I said “I have 4 Shelly 1’s that I have been sitting on for nearly a year that I need to get installed soon”.

So I got to thinking about how someone is always leaving the garage lights on…yep. I want to throw a Shelly in there so I can automate turning those off when nobody is home or when there is nobody in the garage.

I got home from work and thought, “I’ll throw a Shelly in here real quick. It should only take 20 minutes.”

Kill the power. Pop the cover off the switch box. It’s a dual gang box with a ZWave switch for controlling the coach lights outside the garage, and a normal dumb switch for the interior garage lights. Pulled the dumb switch out and wired in my Shelly. It’s a pretty simple job so, no big deal. Before wrapping everything back up, I need to make sure it’s working, right?

Flip the breaker to provide power. All I hear is a relay. Click, click, click, click, click…“Crap. Did I wire that wrong?”. Kill power. Check wiring. Nope it’s good. Is the relay click coming from the Shelly? Cut power back on. Click, click, click, click… “WTF? It’s the Zwave switch!”. I never even touched the Zwave. Sigh. Kill power. Pull Zwave, make sure I didn’t accidentally disconnect or short something. Nope, nothing of the sort. QUICK! To the internet!

… … … clicking relay … … GE … JASCO … Zwave …

“Dammit, she’s dead, Jim”

“OK, I’ll throw this spare switch I have lying on the shelf in there and test it.” Pop the spare in, and power everything back on. No clicking. Cool. Let’s get it added to the ZWave network. Cue an hour plus of running from my office back to the garage. Add device, reset switch, clicky clicky the switch to add it…nothing…restart HA and Zwave network…nothing. Rinse. Repeat.

ARGH!

Screw it…I’m installing 2 Shelly 1’s tonight!

Get the other Shelly wired in, before buttoning everything back up, let’s get them set up in the app so I can get them on the network.

Cue another 45 minutes of cursing and faffing about with my phone and a Shelly…only to find out I had left the VPN turned on on my phone and it wasn’t scanning the IoT subnet correctly…FML.

So now I have 2 Shelly 1’s installed…and my automations are back in working order, and now I can set up the garage interior lights. Phew…at least I was able to take a 20 minute break to munch on some pollo y al pastor tacos…mmmmmm…tacos.

You know, after 20 years of working in the IT field, and 31 years of tinkering with computers and electronics, I should know better than to ever think that it will REALLY only take 20 minutes. Thankful that my wife at least came to check on me every 30 minutes, even if it was to just say “So you’re still in the dark out here?”

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haha story of my life. It will only take 15 minutes.
I normally have to do it when the wife is out or a sleep. If not she will get pissed and want me to rip everything out everywhere.

glad you got it all sorted.

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Yeah it is good to have someone checking when you are playing with the leccy.

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It’s when a task that you predict should only take 20 minutes actually only takes 20 minutes … makes you feel like you just won the lottery.

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or if it takes 15 minutes, you got the jackpot too.

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no, you then question what you did wrong and spend the next half hour double checking everything.

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Good storytelling skills @flamingm0e ! I really enjoyed reading your story :slight_smile:

As an IT guy as well, I recognize the bad time estimating. In your head it seems easy, you got it all planned out. But once you get started, it almost seems like I’m always affected by Murphy’s law. Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong xD

Glad you eventually got things working though! Haha

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This was me, too, yesterday. Only I didn’t even have to open a switch box. I’d been putting off adding some wireless buttons to my daughter’s room to handle a few regularly occurring tasks and was growing tired of having to yank out my phone to do it.

Should be easy right? Add the Xiaomi Aqara Switch to Zigbee2MQTT. Create a handful of automations. Done.

Nope. Pairing that thing was terrible. Most of my switches like that use the native Aqara integration. Why I decided to push this one through Zigbee2MQTT, I don’t know. Once it was finally paired, writing the automations was a bunch of trial and error because the button presses aren’t events with Zigbee2MQTT, they are state changes. And one of the button presses needs to change an input_select back and forth with each button press between two states. And everything I did would end up firing both automations because the state of the device was still indicating it was pressed once the input_select was changed, which would cause the second one to fire, then the first again, then the second again, until the state of the button finally went back to indicating it was not pressed.

This is why events are events and states are states. It makes me wish Home Assistant’s MQTT implementation included MQTT events. I mean, it does as an automation. But it would be amazing if events could be fired based on MQTT discovery. Then ZIgbee2MQTT could configure those events automatically for things that should be events.

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That NEVER happens :rofl:

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Yesterday I was doing LED strip lights in the kitchen (infrastructure there for 3 months or so but other things to do)
One controller, strips run under two floating shelves and across the top of a bank of cupboards. One output split 3 ways. Sunday the wife INSISTED that her floating shelves be installed.
So I put them up and went to wire the strips.
3 hours tops !
So I got the strippers and soldering iron out…
With the wife looking over my shoulder (I HATE that !)
It’s amazing the level of disapproval and impatience that can be conveyed in just a look.
Well 6 hours later everything is in, looking neat and tidy.
She can’t wait and starts loading things onto the shelves, whilst I go for my tablet to thrill her with the results and justify my obsession with putting them in.
Zip, Zilch, Nuttin, Nada, Zero, Nuffin…
(how come all these negative words start with a Z or an N ?)
All because I had no time to test as I went along, now I have a Full installation to go over, test for shorts, continuity and polarity rather than finding the faults as I went.
(I just pray :pray: I’ve not fried the controller = expensive ! )
I’ll have to leave it now until she’s away for the weekend or something cos I do admit I tend to fill every horizontal space with tools AND to avoid the ‘dagger like’ looks :cry:

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Story of everyone’s lives lol. I usually try to do it late at night when wife’s asleep or she’s out shopping also. And whenever the lights happen to not work, it’s “usually” my fault.

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somehow it just feels like vengeance…
for 3 years I’ve been trying to get my wife not to use the bathroom switch as therer’s a sensor with a “smart automation” … :grinning:
Finally, she’s started using it recently; however, one early morning when unraid was doing it’s backups HA was down and offcouse the light didnt work…
Im still hearing about it… :rofl: :rofl:

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LOL. I hear this all the time.

“Why didn’t the alarm arm itself when I left to go to the store?”

I was working on the system at the time…

“Why didn’t the lights go off when they were supposed to?”

Sigh…I was restarting HA because I was adding ‘features’. It missed that window of time it is supposed to run the automation…

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So… I have jasco switches all over my house. Only 2 have died. One died when I plugged my vacuum into the outlet that was being controlled by the switch. I.E. I must have went over 600w with the vacuum and the circuit blew.

The second one died when I did exactly what you did. I cut the power to the circuit. Never came back on. When the power was out to the circuit, i accidentally shocked myself as the switch next to it in the same box was live. (I hate my builder for that btw). Either way cutting the power or the shock caused the switch to die.

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You’re just lucky that it didn’t make ‘you’ die :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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Eh, it was grounded so… just a normal day.

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During my furious Googling, I learned this was a common problem with the GE/JASCO Zwave switches. Losing power to them would randomly kill the relay, which is an odd manufacturing design.

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I’m not surprised then. That confirms my suspicions. I always turn the power on/off. So it’s a low chance. I’m wondering if the new models fix the issue.

EDIT: If not, i’ll just slowly switch brands.

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For ‘slowly’ read - when they break (but have replacements ready)
Do you think they did this ‘Russian roulette’ thing as a sort of random reduction on end of life or (for them) a result of happy circumstance/crap design ??? :rofl:

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This!
How can that happen so often???