Switches and Plugs Randomly Changing States

Since around the first part of August, after an HA upgrade, I have had random lights go on or off, change colors, garage door open, or fans go on or off. Devices that have been stable (no firmware upgrades for over a year) are randomly being triggered. The occurrences are not often, only about 1 a day but it seems to be increasing. The HA logs record that the light/door is activated and the MQTT logs shows the command sent to the device. I see no errors. No idea where to go from here.

Has anyone else had unexplained events happen?

Does the logbook have context for what activated the lights. e.g.

Not that I could see. Only that they were turned on (and then off by me via the phone app).
I can see in MQTT Explorer where MQTT send a command to shift on.

What I need is extensive logging that is retained so that I can go back several hours as sometimes I don’t know a switch was activated. I happen to be in my office when one of two light bulbs when off. I happen to notice my wife’s office light was on during midday on Sunday. The two living room light bulbs were on and one was turned green (normally yellow/orange). Truly random but all through the MQTT server. I need better logging (or more education) to see where the command originate as they com through.

I have HA running on a NUC. It has been flawless for over a year then it’s just like it hit the “terrible twos” and started rebelling.

In your configuration.yaml file add (or edit) this:

logger:
  default: debug

Then restart.

Try not to leave it that way any longer than you need to. It is a lot of logs and apart from the CPU load it will hasten the death of SD cards (not an issue for you, but others who may read this).

Done! Thanks. I will report back when I notice another issue. It would be nice if the logging could be sent to a syslog server.

I’m not sure if you are experiencing the same problem as I sometimes have with my Zigbee lights. I sometimes have the odd bulb come on without and obvious interaction, which I’ve put down to electrical interference. E.g My office ceiling has a number of Geldopto Zigbee bulbs, when I go into the garage which is adjacent and turn on the light there, it sometimes causes some of the office bulbs to turn on. I think it’s because the garage light is an old fluorescent tube and the kick off the start is causing some interference.

Might be worth considering in you case?

Don’t have any answers for you, sorry, but I just posted a very similar issue which just started after upgrading to 2022.8.1 from 2022.7.x. So now that I see your post thinking there is something bigger going on.

Incorrect MQTT Sensor State After Upgrade - Configuration - Home Assistant Community (home-assistant.io)

Short Update: I did three things somewhat simultaneously, I turned on “debug” to track the source, upgraded to 22.8.7, and unplugged my microphone being used for Rhasspy (which was recently installed) with the logic being there could be an issue there also, hearing erroneous commands and acting on it - which is highly unlikely but tried anyway. I have ran two days without a noticeable incident. I have since plugged my microphone for Rhasspy back in. I really expect (hope) the 22.8.7 upgrade most likely solved the issue but will advise as I wait for a failure.

Thanks for the update. I was hopeful 22.8.7 might fix as well but didn’t see anything in the change log that mentioned anything similar. But will probably give that a go too. Thanks again.

Somewhat final reply: I have ran for several days after upgrading to 22.8.7 and have had no noticeable events. In the past, the main occurrence was the garage door opening and office lights activating. All is running perfect. Consider this closed.

Well it’s back. Yesterday the garage door suffered another ‘unexplained’ opening. I had turned off debugging on logging. It is now back on. More replies when I have more details.

This afternoon I re-enabled the garage door and this evening my garage door opened unexpectedly. I have the log file, debug enabled, that would have captured the event. I have the log from that event but I need help understand what happen. The garage_door opened and I immediately closed it using the iPhone Home Assistant app and I have pared down the log to reflect these events.

Rolling over to a new post.