I have certain devices such as bulbs or smart power strips that are behind a physical power switch or nested behind master power-off groups. This causes a fair few “Failed setup, will retry” Integrations which blindly re-setup every ~90 seconds needlessly for hours or sometimes days while the devices are physically powered off. It would be great if it were possible to have an option to disable this automatic blind 90 second re-setup on a per-device/integration instance level and instead have this setup be triggered by an automation / scriptable service task.
Examples of such tasks:
Knowing that the 4 ceiling bulbs are behind a Zigbee wall light switch that is always-powered and knowing that the ceiling bulbs take about 1-2 seconds to boot/come online, it would be possible to have a switch-triggered-on automation/action to a perform a re-setup of those specific bulbs to get them online much quicker than up-to-90-seconds, removing polling re-setup behavior that can bog down when dozens of devices are offline, and saving power by not needing to keep these bulbs powered and turned off in order to work around this polling re-setup behvaior.
Many devices that I have set up like this are Wi-Fi devices that are assigned DHCP reservations. It would be trivial to add a ping task (also polling but much lighter duty) that triggers a re-setup when ping starts responding after a period of not responding. Or possibly even a smarter task that might be possible to plumb with the Unifi integration for a device appearing so that not even ping polling would be needed.
Unfortunately, this is only a partial solution and does not fully work as I would hope. Using Spook, It seems to work for certain devices but not for others. For example, for tp-link devices when the device is disabled it doesn’t loop re-setup and it doesn’t show as “Failed setup, will retry” in the integrations view; however, Android TV remote and Android Debug Bridge (to control an Android smart TV) still loop re-setup and show angry red “Failed setup, will retry” in my installed integrations list even though when you click in and observe the device it does in fact show a yellow “The device is disabled by User.” in the device view.
So unfortunately this third party solution does not seem complete or viable as more than a partial stop-gap until a proper solution is implemented in HA directly for this; therefore, my feature request still stands.
I doubt anyone will create a fix for something like this.
The issue here is that you remove the power from devices.
And the fix is quite easy for someone who doesn’t understand the reasoning for switching the power off.
Well, nobody will create a fix or improvement if nobody is requesting it and/or the request gets snuffed out by people who think it’s unnecessary just because they don’t find it useful for themselves.
The main use case is reduction of power consumption. When you have dozens or hundreds of smart home devices, those power consumptions start to add up. I had hundreds of watts of idle power consumption by devices that were “powered-but-off” and sitting there doing nothing but making themselves available in HA. By putting these devices behind power switches or smart plugs it saves a lot of power. The request for this functionality is valid.
The issue is not that I am removing power from the devices, especially when the removal of that power is controlled by HA itself in most instances. It should have a facility to know “hey, I am powering off this device, so I shouldn’t blindly try to spam re-setup routines for it every 90 seconds until I power it back on”.
-edit- Simple example: I have a clothes washer that uses 5W when idle 24/7 (only a year old or so, please don’t suggest I buy a new one…). I put it behind a simple Zigbee smart plug which uses 0.2W and I control in HA. This smart plug costs $10. The payback period is 2 years where I live with crazy cheap electricity of only 11 cents per kWh (It could be as fast as 6 months in California or many EU countries). In other words, after 2 years the electricity savings from adding that smart plug pays for the smart plug itself. Then, the many years after that it’s ‘free’ money going back into my pocket on top of basically getting free smart home gear. Sounds pretty smart to me. I don’t know why more people aren’t doing this. This feature request is here to solve the annoyance of devices that are managed this way constantly showing up as errors in HA when they really aren’t in addition to speeding up get-back-online time of such devices when they are powered back on. HA knows when this device is getting powered off and knows when it’s getting powered back on. It should be able to know the device won’t be reachable and know that its gonna be coming back online and should be reachable again soon.