I’ve noticed a few of my tplink smart plug going unavailable during an automation sometimes and never really thought too much about it until now that I’ve set up a basic sprinkler system using a solanoid and a power supply which is connected to a smart plug. The automation fires for 5 mins then has an auto off. If the automation fires then the tplink plug goes unavailable during that 5 minutes, even for a few seconds the automation never ends and the result is my sprinkler doesn’t turn off.
Anyone else has a problem like this? All I could think to do is have a condition in the automation if tplink status is unavailable call service to turn off
Not with tp-link, but I occasionally have this with hue lights. All of the bedroom lights are set to auto-off after 15 minutes if it’s light or an hour if it’s dark, but occasionally the light will be on for 40 or so minutes and then drop to unavailable, and then go back to ‘on’, so the hour effectively starts again. Obviously if it drops off again during the new hour it goes on and on and I think the max is about 3 and a half hours one bulb stayed on for once.
It’s a shame that the system isn’t intelligent enough to realise that a bulb that is on for 5 minutes, unavailable for 1 minute and then on again for 4 minutes has actually been on for 10 minutes not 4, but such is the way it works and there’s no real simple way around it.
I did think about having a statistics sensor of some kind measure the amount of time the devices have been unavailable and deduct that from the time to make the templated time accurate, but it seems like a lot of effort and added complication for probably very little reward.
i would not use wifi for this use case, as in my experience wifi is not a good protocol for IoT…
lights are ok not to turn off… but flooding is not cool…
I swapped out all my sockets for z-wave and have never looked back… there is no interferrence with competing things/phones tv’s (other more appropriate wifi users) on z-wave…
Otehrwise, connected the solenoid to the GIO’s of a Raspberry r soemthing… have a look at opensprinkler as well…
The TP-Link platform as a whole seems unreliable. It is very frustrating to restart HA and wonder which TP-Link entities won’t be available (there are ALWAYS a few). PLEASE FIX THISSSSSSSSSSSSSS
I doubt this is Home Assistant but most probably, as I mentioned in an earlier post, using WiFi and most probably UDP… wifi plugs are cheap… there is a reason for that…
I get the same TP Link Plugs going unavailable during automations issue from time to time…as noted above most likely down to the cheap and cheerful nature of the kit than anything else.
I needed my switches to turn off after an approx time of being switched on so as a sort of workaround what I did was allow the automation to account for the unavailable state by adding in a secondary trigger for the switch going from Unavailable to On and turning the switch off based on whichever trigger/time was hit first. Not an exact science but (mostly) works for me so I’m happy enough with it
