Shelly 1 relay setup pandemonium

I was just curious if anyone else has had such issues with the shelly 1 relays or am I just a dumbass?

I downloaded and installed the shelly android app. I installed the relay. In the app, I added a device. The app found the relay and prompted me if it could apply my wifi settings to the relay. So far so good but this is where things went awry.

Once the relay was on my wifi it vanished from the app. I could not find it anywhere. Also searching for it via the app also yielded no results. I eventually had to go to my router list of connected devices to find the IP address of the relay to then add that IP address to the app. Once the relay appeared in the app I was prompted to update the firmware. This took almost 10 minutes. Then I tried setting the relay to a static IP via the app. This turned out to be impossible. No matter how I tried the static IP setting would not save. Eventually, I figured out that going to the IP address of the relay gave me a web interface. From the web interface, all the settings are saved on the first go. While changing to static IP I got lots of prompts about the cloud being disabled if static IP is set up. Great, I planned to do that anyway. In the web interface cloud was shown as disabled. If I went back to the app the little cloud symbol next to the relay was still lit and the box was checked to enable it. So I had to disable it twice, once in the web interface and once in the app.

From here I set up three more relays. I found that the firmware update from the web interface was far faster, maybe two minutes. Eventually, I enabled MQTT on all the relays to talk to Home Assitant. It seems that the HA native integration is kind of slow.

My final hurdle was strange. The first 3 relays I named right away. The fourth one I named after the rest of my setup. The relay immediately stopped working. After a bunch of diagnostics, I discovered that the name change shut off MQTT on the relay. All the settings were still there but just the enable checkmark was gone. This makes not sense to me because the name of the relay does not affect MQTT. MQTT messages use only the “number” of the relay and not the name.

I don’t have an explanation as to why you have experienced so many problems but I have always used the web interace (not the App) and never had any major issues. Also, if you are on recent Shelly firmware revision then there is no reason to enable MQTT as the Shelly is discoverable by Home Assistant provided you enable it in the web UI:

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Further info can be found here:

Using MQTT came from a problem I experienced. I initially used the native HA shelly integration. What I experienced is as follows.

I have one relay on a switch. That relay then triggers three others to turn on. There was a 3/4 to 1 second delay between the switched light turning on and the others turning on. At first I was using Node-Red. Then I tried HA automation with no difference. Then I switched them to MQTT and the delay went down to almost instant to 1/4 second.