Edit 2 (lol omg 
) : apparently the lawn mower man heard my prayers (or else Ctulhu whoever came first) and by the time i wrote this and went downstairs apparently the device got turned on so it seems to work for now which boils down to the strange notion that 7200 seconds of timeout is a good idea to set a device as unavailable. I tried again, turned it on ramped up the amps, waited for it to flip off then a small minute, then yanked it out (like the people involved probably would most of the time) and lo and behold somewhat between 30 and 60 seconds it did what i programmed it to do … im mostly a noob to this and i have no idea or way of on how to diagnose lag on a zigbee network and since this isnt critical like a heart pump in a hospital im gonna leave it at “it works” for now (its a peculiar situation where i personally would opt to have the circuit ripped out of the wall and split into two, preferably 3 different ones each with their own wires and breakers but i doubt the people involved will want that and thats irrelevant to the point here)
the takeaway is : zigbee - configure - timeout (scroll down) set to whatever you think acceptable somewhere under 7200 or 21600 seconds and it seems to work
i hope this helped it helped me … well i helped me … well the guy from australia helped a little too
id wait a little to trust this thing with the lock on the front door, really …
EOF .
Edit : after some digging and moving the catmobile all the way to Australia i found this guy :
as it turns out devices are standard set to become unavailable after 7200 seconds (do the math) with battery powered devices after 21600 ( im not even gonna ask) so switching 7200 to 120 seems to move to unavailable when i do a page refresh so i’ll assume internally it will (web ui is really no comment but for anti-trackerphone people i dont know another option) … the thing is
my automation still doesnt turn the other device on so probably its some kind of either state the visual editor gets wrong or else it simply doesnt work … as much as id like HA to save me time every time i sit at the config table fro a bit it seems to cost me time so my time for today is up, if i find more ill post it here but it does detect unavailable now (after 120 seconds)
orig 
second, i have a device that needs to go online when someone pulls out a plug instead of turning off another one but when i do in the UI it just stays in the last state “using 9amps etc” for as i can see forever more or less and i have no way of pinging it or whatever, it usually takes about 5 seconds for HA to respond to a trigger but in this case the device simply stays available in the UI even after 10 page refreshes and by now 20+ minutes not online it shows as online but
Blockquote Current
9.2 A
Power
2,055 W
Summation delivered
12.68 kWh
Voltage
223 V
Blockquote
it just stays like that
when i put it back in after “some” time it flips the other device on as the power is detected to be zero (well "under 0.1 i dont know where the “is equal to” is stored in YAML) but for now as long as i have tested if i yank it out (its not about me its about the people using it) it stays in the state it was at the time it got unplugged, assuming a built in wall socket would probably not have this but reality bites to the point that atm i have neither time nor funds to install one there so its biting my ar*e and i dont know how to ping or otherwise iterate over devices to see if they’re available because if they dont show as unavailable they wont be to a polling script
this is a bit of a breaker lol , all workarounds involve electronics or putting both sockets on one with a multi and then measuring the combined amperage
now i dont believe HA is not supposed to do this , it should detect offline devices, right ? even if it might take a minute or so but it somewhat kinda totally does not (in my case , zigbee, totally supported everything works just fine but this thing in this case doesnt)
some kind of “ping” command to be used with or outside of HA might be useful too, anything is appreciated (also the "where is the “is equal to” operator lol)
