WiFi path randomly stops working, wired ok

Configuration
1

My issue is unrelated to a specific HA update or config or automation change, although this started several weeks ago.

My Android phone app and phone chrome browser stops working randomly. I go to my wired iMac, pull up HA using a chrome browser and perform a reset. My phone WiFi access is restored.

This leads me to question WiFi access to HA.

Other WiFi-connected devices don’t have this issue on my network.

I don’t understand what might be causing this issue.

I would love to hear your questions and comments on a solution.

2

Hello Dennis Page,

Good call.
I suggest you do not do this if you can help it.
Home Assistant is a server and the satellite Iot devices expect it to always be available. Can’t guarantee that with WIFI.

3

IP address conflict between your phone and HA, maybe?

There is not much to go from in your text and WiFi or wired connection should not matter here, unless you entire WiFi is affected.

4

Yeah, I don’t have much to go on, either.

I am referring to accessing HA on the HA phone app using WiFi to my local network. Is the phone app not advisable?

The phone app works fine some random hours, and it doesn’t work other random hours in a day. I can access other things on my local network from my phone while HA access is not available.

When HA is not accessible, the HA app presents the normal “Refresh URL” screen and the Chrome browser simply times out.

It’s not an IP address issue. Nothing changes between working and not working, except random time.

The wired iMac always accesses HA. Phone access is regained after using the wired iMac to restart HA.

The system logs show nothing.

Is this unique to my HA?

5

I read that as your Ha server is on WIFI.

If you are running some addon that messed with your network then Ha could be messing with it.
(Pihole, Adware, nginx, dnsserver, something like that.)
Otherwise updating Ha has nothing to d with an android device on the network.

6

I did install a Zooz 800 Z-WAVE GPIO Module. Nothing happened right away. I later installed the Z-Wave Addon and Integration. Nothing happened. I connected a Z-Wave a device. Nothing. I added the the ZigBee Addon, but no devices yet.

Sometime along the way, random ghosting started with the phone app. I’m not sure at what point I noticed the issue. Maybe I have to backtrack by uninstalling in the reverse order.

The mystery continues…

7

Is it a Raspberry Pi or a HA green you are running HA on?

8

It’s a Home Assistant Yellow.

So, I found on another forum that a device working mode disrupts WiFi. I changed the mode and my HA app has had no issues for 36 hours.

I’m going to call this issue SOLVED. It had nothing to do with Home Assistant.

9

It is good if it is solved. I do not have a clue what device working mode you are talking about though.

And if it do return, then I suggest you get a powered USB hubs for those radios and make sure you use at least a 30cm extension cable on them.

The Raspberry Pis and their variants are known for having poor power designs, so do not expect to be able to pull much power from the USB ports, which is why the powered USB hub is a common step in troubleshooting.

The 30cm extension cable is due to a well-known fact that the USB3 ports interfere with the radios and especially the 2.4GHz band, so the radio antennas needs to be moved away from the USB3 ports.

1 Like
10

Good advice for USB radios.

The devices are Eufy battery cams connected to a Eufy Homebase 3. The cameras use WiFi to connect to the HB.
The cameras are not accessible directly on WiFi when connected to the HB. The HB is wired to the WiFi router and has a ‘performance’ and ‘standard’ mode. Some users found that the ‘performance’ mode clobbers random 2.4GHz channels. This, I believe, is the reason I randomly could not connect to HA with my phone using WiFi and had no issues connecting with my wired computer. In ‘standard’ mode the HB is fixed to channel 11, according to reports. The random connection issues stopped after setting HB WiFi mode to ‘standard’.

11

Ahh!!
Yeah, the word performance can be a tricky one, because performance can be read differently.
Here it is probably meant to be a performance that provide the optimal picture update frequency and not the performance that runs best on the network.

1 Like
12

True.

I suggest ‘performance’ in this case means milti-channel WiFi communication. ‘Standard’ means fixed channel communication, ch. 11.

I don’t know why eufy is vague about it.

I suppose it’s an attempt to make the cameras less vulnerable to jamming.

There could be other reasons as multiple cameras use the same 2.5GHz WiFi network even though they are inaccessible when connected to the Homebase.

13

The problem returned. I cannot connect to HA using my phone randomly. The phone app and browser connect to HA by WiFi. HA is connected to the WiFi router by wire.

There no pattern, no time of day, no days of week. I have ruled out my WiFi cameras after taking action there.

I decided that my Yellow was too close to the WiFi gateway and moved it away with a 6 foot (1.8 meter) Ethernet cable. The closeness was affecting ZigBee performance.

>>During the time my phone can’t connect to HA using the app and browser, it does connect to other WiFi devices on my network.<<

Now this has me stumped.