I’m looking for a smart LED lamp for use in an outdoor light fitting (ES / E27).
I’ve got a lot of Tapo and Extrastar (Tuya) lights insude ths house, where they work well.
Problem is, the wifi signal outside the house is a bit weaker, and Tapo lamps that I’ve tried seem to drop their cloud connection every now and then, and HA seems to lose track of them so they just stay switched off.
I’m using automations to turn them on at sunset, off at dawn. They switch on OK, but are off (and stay off) before midnight.
For one of the lights, my plan is to fit a Shelly Mini inside the switch back box, as I have a neutral at the switch.
For the other light, there is no neutral at the switch, and no room in the back box, so I need a solution that can be installed inside the light fitting, and that’ll work reliably with a fairly weak signal. The current Tapo bulb is reporting -53 wifi.
I’ve already got eight TP Link Deco mesh devices around the house.
Alternatively, is there a way to set up an automation that’ll make sure the light comes back on again if it drops offline? I can live with it being off for a few seconds.
I don’t have any quick answers for you - I started with all wifi bulbs and had all sorts of issues similar to yours. Switched to a mesh network and most of my problems went away but not all. Ended up changing all my bulbs and some sensors to Zigbee and have a lot less issues.
A zigbee coordinator and Zigbee bulbs. Since this is outdoors you might need additional routers (basically anything Zigbee that does not run on batteries) to get sufficent coverage. Read the Zigbee section here The Home Assistant Cookbook - Index
Thanks. A quick read through of a few of those “articles”, and I really can’t see any advantage over normal 2.4gHZ wifi for me.
It looks like Zigbee, using the same frequency band, will have the same problems as my (pretty good) wifi mesh - poor penetration through solid walls.
I can see that it would work well if all my “smart home” devices were Zigbee, and presumably Zigbee doesn’t suffer from the ip adressing limitations of wifi?
It seems like overkill to get 1 dodgy lightbulb working reliably, so not really for me.
I’ve had a closer look at the HA logs for the dodgy outside light, and adding an extra Deco mesh device closer to the Tapo smartbulb has almost eliminated the cloud disconnect errors.
The “sunset” automation turns the light on, but “something” is turning the light off just after 11pm. It’s reported in the logs, but no further details are given.
I guess that means that something else is turning it off, not HA itself, and not a loss of connectivity.
I’ve looked carefully at the Tapo app, and Alexa, and there’s nothing active that controls the lamp.
A bit of a mystery.
Maybe I’ll just fit a Smart Life bulb, as none of the ones I’m using are showing any disconnects in HA, while all the Tapo devices do, just the ones with strong signals do it a lot less often.
I fitted an Extrastar (Smartlife) bulb yesterday, and exactly the same thing happened overnight- light went off before midnight.
There were no wifi dropouts or other errors, the light just switched off.
I had a closer look in the logs at what else happened a minute either side, and saw that the bedside lights in both bedrooms also switched off.
Turns out it was a bad Alexa Routine. I’ve got a voice routine to turn off the bedside light and put the Echo Show into “do not disturb” mode (blank display), and I’d inadvertently set this to turn off “lights”, rather than turn off “bedside light”.