Rainforest Eagle RFA-Z109 integration issues

I am new to HA. Using HAOS on Rpi3B+ and Ethernet. Installed today on SD card.

I setup the Rainforest Eagle integration, with the local device IP. At first, it seemed to work, showing a couple of sensors.

However, shortly afterwards, I logged in to the device via HTTP and saw the following :slight_smile:

The image shows “Unknown Device Type - Please contact support”.
I rebooted the device once, and that resolved it.

But then, it started happening again. This time, it resolved on its own, though.

I have never seen this error before. I’m not 100% sure it is caused by the HA integration, as I’m testing multiple software packages (HomeSeer being another).

My questions are :

  1. has anyone else using this device seen the problem using just HA ?
  2. are any of these sensors suitable for use with the Energy management feature ?
    And if so, which one ? Again, very new to HA here.
  3. is there any other way to use the data from the Eagle in HA Energy Management ? The HTTP UI provides for CSV data downloads, with Unix timestamps and demand in the columns

It happens far too frequently on mine (I have the “100” model without WiFi). I’m awaiting somebody to “jailbreak” these things so I can get the Zigbee certificate from it and write something that is actually reliable.

FWIW when it gets into this state the thing is completely borked. The local access stops working, as does the Rainforest Cloud access. I’ve only ever fixed it by pulling the power and resetting, it has never resolved on its own. I contacted Rainforest support about it once and they had no better option. This ought to be something their IT can reproduce and fix in the dang firmware, but nope.

Yes, it sure happens a lot. I bought a $15 smartplug (TP-Link KP125) to automatically pull the power on the Eagle 100 for me. I do it every 3 hours - at midnight, 3am, 6am, 9am, etc. This usually takes care of the above problem (“unknown device type”) popping up. I experimented with longer times - first daily, then 12 hours, then 6 hours, but ultimately settled on 3 hours. Once every few months, the problem will show up, and not be fixable by a reboot. At that point, I have to open a new ticket and get Rainforest to fix it.

Also, every couple weeks, the Home Assistant integration can no longer read from my Eagle, even though the web page works fine, and it continues to upload to Wattvision properly. The only workaround I found is to restart HomeAssistant. That solves the issue.

Also, last month, I had to call PG&E to reset the Smartmeter. The Eagle could no longer read from it. Whatever PG&E did on their side fixed the issue - the Eagle started reading from the Smart meter again right away. I lost 4 days of net metering data, though. That was the first time in 7 years I had to do that. The issue started after one of the Eagle reboot. Maybe my Eagle got rebooted in the middle of some Zigbee message at the “wrong” time. This suggests a wireless bug on the SmartMeter Zigbee side of things, sigh.

So, overall, there a LOT of issues with the Eagle. I am with you - we should be able to get the data from the SmartMeter directly with Zigbee. Someone has got to write the software for that, though .

The Eagle can work fine with Wattvision upload for months at a time without any reboot, IF the HA integration is disabled. It certainly did for 7+ years before I started using HA and integrating with it.

I am really not in love with cloud solutions, but I wish there was a way to download the Wattvision data into HomeAssistant, and then the HA integration for the Eagle could be disabled. However, I don’t think the current HA design for energy metering allows for this - it only records current real-time sensor data, and can’t record past data. I like having the real-time wattage data in HA (or as close as I can get, which is typically between 1-30 seconds). I look at this a lot. Probably should just install more PV and stop looking …