Light intermittently unavailable

1

Evening all.

I’ve got an issue where two or three of my lights are randomly going to the unavailable state. on the console i see this on one of them:

00:26:58 MQT: stat/Sonoff-7525/POWER = ON
00:27:03 MQT: Attempting connection...
00:27:03 MQT: Connect failed to 192.168.12.201:1883, rc -2. Retry in 10 sec
00:27:05 DNS: Initialized
00:27:09 DNS: Initialized
00:27:15 DNS: Initialized
00:27:17 MQT: Attempting connection...
00:27:17 MQT: Connected

I’ve got about 20 plug/ lights in total, just got these two or three that dropping out. is it likely to be a wifi issue?

Thanks for the help in advance.

2

Possibly. What wifi router are you using and how many clients are connected in total (including phones / tablets / etc…)?
Most have a practical limit. It’s about 40 clients per Unifi AP. Less than 32 clients for my Netgear R7000.

3

I’ve got 36 clients connected to my AP’s in total, that’s all smart devices, laptops, tablets etc. I’ve got four access points, and they are all configured for auto power, and auto channel. the house isn’t that large. a standard uk terraced house really, but went with four AP Pro’s as i was having some speed issues when i had two (that turned out to be linked to a number of gu10 smart bulbs i had.

4

That should be fine then.

There’s an RSSI (received signal strength indicator), 0 to 100% in Tasmota. You have to issue status 2 command to get it. Maybe graphing that will shed some light.

This is something I’ve been meaning to implement for my sonoffs but have only found this poorly formatted example so far:

https://github.com/arendst/Sonoff-Tasmota/issues/451

If your RSSI is good the only other thing I can think of is interference from some other source. The problematic sonoff’s arn’t near a microwave oven are they?

EDIT: found a better example:

5

Thanks Tom,
I installed TasmoAdmin last night (i’m running everything on dockers in unraid.)

I’ve recorded these two videos this morning, There was a large amount of interference and channel hopping when i had the unifi controller set to auto power and auto channel, so the two AP’s furthest apart have been set to channels 6, and the other two set to channel one and 11 and the channel widths was set to HT20 on all AP’s Band steering is set to off, and load balancing for the AP’s is set to seven clients, (despite that there are still 15 clients connected to one ap and 3 to another.)

I’ve set the channel widths to ht40 now, kept the channels on the 6, 6, 1, 11, and set the power to medium. The Sonoffs in question are not near a microwave, nor are they near a cordless telephone base units.

HomeAssistant Dashboard monitoring switches

TasmoAdmin Monitoring.

6

I’ve enabled PMF and changed the load balancing to 8 clients. The balancing is still off with as many as 13 on one ap, and 3 on another, but nothing seems to be dropping out at the moment. - scrap that, still getting some dropouts.

I’ve got a three minute scan of the wifi at home. I’ve two network, Woody84 (which is what i use for my family wifi, and Wan17 that i use with a separate vlan for all of the smart tech all running on the DMZ on my firewall. (All smart tech is in the DMZ, the mqtt broker, the switches, and the ha server.)