I have just being working to get the optimum solution for my Sonoff setup (10 S20s and a 2 POW r2). After getting MQTT discovery working (a real life saver) I was frustrated that the stat/sonoff-example/RESULT = {“POWER1”:“OFF”} message was not retained and was what being used in discovery as the state message.
Retained messages always seemed a bit of a hack to me so was looking for an alternate method. My first reaction was to send a blank power message to each device (which would return the RESULT message) at startup. This works but was not scalable as it defeated the point of discovery. After a good nights sleep remembered the group message for the Sonoff (in my case sonoffs). So a message mqtt publish -h 192.168.0.127 -t “cmnd/sonoffs/power” - m “” at startup will get a response from all sonoffs. Problem solved
- id: ‘1540504583324’
alias: Retrieve Sonoff state
trigger:- event: start
platform: homeassistant
condition: []
action: - data:
payload: ‘’
topic: cmnd/sonoffs/power
service: mqtt.publish
- event: start