WeMo Switch Problem

I’ve got 7 WeMo switches at home, auto-discovery worked fine. My problem is, when I try to toggle them on or off using HA, I get the popup on screen saying “Turned on switch.front_porch_light.”… but the light doesn’t come on, and after about a second the HA toggle switch goes back to the off position. I also get nothing in the logs indicating an error. If I refresh the page, the HA toggle switches do show the correct state of the actual switches, it just can’t toggle them on or off.

I’m running HA 0.36.1, and all WeMo switches are up to date on firmware.

Anybody else having this issue? Anything I could look at? Thanks

I have only one Wemo connected and have had no problem, I would suggest that unplugging six for setup would be best way to approach the problem. As an IT consultant specialising in fault finding trouble shooting hardware and software the rule is start with the simplest configuration possible.

I actually start with single Wemo or whatever I connect on extension lead next to keyboard so I can see what is happening, it may be limitations in software, adding one by one is only way to identify if so.

Hass is based on pywemo and I have found it unreliable as well. I also have the exact same problem with wemo/alexa native integration.

Not exactly out-of-box, but I installed NPM and use this script agilemation/Belkin-WeMo-Command-Line-Tools.

Here is my config if you need to see my setup. Now my hass switches are fully reliable, and I need to migrate alexa over to emulated hue… or just ditch this wemo garbage forever.

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I have 4 (2 switches, 2 light switches, but the use essentially the same firmware) and the work great for me. I gave them static IPs and do not use dynamic discovery.

The only time I had a problem was when they were behind NAT because I initially could only get them to connect via my guest wifi. When behind NAT it wouldn’t update if you switched it outside HA because it couldn’t register for events.

I suggest testing with a command line tool like above or
http://moderntoil.com/?p=839

Just be aware that the script at moderntoil will rename your device if you use the get friendly name command (just change set to get if you want to fix it).

I have 11 Wemo light switches and they are working great. The response time from HASS is superb. I use static IP addresses rather the discovery.

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I have four installed in my home, and I also don’t have any issue. I also use static IP addresses.

Maybe it would be worth re-configuring for static, to see if it helps your issue?

I used the official app to set them up initially, but haven’t touched it since.

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Weird, I have everything on dhcp reservations. My hass configuration did use the ‘static’ IP configuration and still had inconsistent behaviour and never was able to keep state properly.

Could just be a ghost in the machine, but native alexa/wemo also is inconsistent with the bedroom light switch I have. Overall I can’t pinpoint the inconsistency… using the wemo npm script above is fine 100% of the time.

I’ve had similar happen the odd time to my pair.

In my case, usually it was something moved around and so blocking / reducing the wifi signal strength of the plugs.

Moved any furniture, metal objects around recently?

To build on this, if your wifi is intermittent/spotty in general you will see some delay/lost signals. Sometimes after a router reboot they take some extra time to get going.

When I first set mine up, I ended up moving one of the wifi APs in my house in order to get a clean signal to the switch in my garage. Sometimes just a foot or two in one direction makes all the difference.

To update, I added ONE of the seven switches to the configuration.yaml with a hard coded IP address to see if I could get that switch working, and everything started working properly. Not just that one switch, but all of them. I then removed the hard coded entry from the configuration.yaml file to test, and they all reverted back to the non-functional state. I then added the single hard coded entry back in, and they all started working again. Very strange

I’ll probably go ahead and reserve their IP’s and hard code the rest of them in there, just to be consistent, but that’s where I stand currently.

Thanks for the suggestions, all!

Setting up any permanently (or even semi-permanently) hardware installed in your house with a static IP address is generally a good practice, anyway. If you are ever doing any network troubleshooting, for example, knowing that all of your light switches (or laptops, or sensors, or whatever) are in the same range can be handy.

As a rule of thumb - If the thing is going to be always on, always connected (and isn’t a temporary device), I give it a static IP. This has the extra advantage of the peace of mind of knowing that a mismatched dhclient assignment isn’t going to cause a problem months/years down the line.

Of course, if your network is less than a dozen or so devices, this may be overkill. YMMV.

This is just brilliant. So much simpler than the python scripts I was mucking around with. THANK YOU!