Awesome Tips 8 tips to fix ANYTHING in your Smart Home!
If something in your smart home breaks, try these 8 tips for fixing it!
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Motion sensor night light:
Zigbee Smart Plug for a Zigbee Repeater:
Z-Wave Range Extender:
Aqara contact sensor:
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0:00 Intro
0:23 Turn it off and on
1:29 Replace the batteries
2:00 Reset contact sensor
3:00 Turn off data
3:22 Debugging WiFi issues
4:22 Zigbee Z-Wave issues
5:08 Reload HA integration
5:46 Update firmware/hub
6:15 Every 2 weeks…
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MUSIC
Digifunk by DivKid
All of the music throughout is by Nihilore.
Spotify playlist:
Ending song is The End by EVA.
Deals for Days. Big home savings are happening now.
What's your #1 tip for fixing something that's not working in your smart home?
HI to everyone,
I have just bought a garage away from home and I would like to make some automation like turning on lights when the gate opens, controlling outlets and so on…
I have no internet access, but I have plenty of raspberry…
any suggestion?
should I use RPI as AP and use homeassistant in the docker version?
should I use some other hub?
any suggestion is welcome… maybe someone has already had a similar situation…
I was skeptical about WiFi repeaters, but now they’re underrated lol
Im confused at #3 tho. My Aqara Contact Sensors never need a battery change or disconnect. Had em since 2021 and theyre still at 100% battery. Pretty sure they build as tough and reliable as a Nokia 3310 lol.
Jokes aside great video.
I had to get a smart plug to reboot my Moen smart shut off valve every time it loses a connection
If your fresh new battery does not solve the issue then double check that the battery is good using a voltmeter or multimeter.
LoL, my wife was irritated that when she searched something in Google and clicked on the Amazon product link she would get a message "Site can not be reached". The worst thing is to have a wife that cannot get to Amazon through a Google search, on her iPhone. WOW!! Checked my iPhone and the same thing. When I looked at the UI log, I found that the UI ad blocker was blocking the "googleadservice" page and Google stopped dead in its tracks. I had to unblock that site in the ad blocker in UI and now she is happy. It had to be one of the latest UI updates. What next. One good thing, she is happy with HA… now back to adding more HA devices to keep her happy. It is the best excuse that I have. Great video
I had a few Aqara devices disconnect from Home Assistant and not wanting to connect back. The thing that fixed it for me is to force them into pairing mode (holding the button for a while) and adding them again in Home Assistant (through Zigbee integration). No need to remove the devices from Home Assistant. Just enter pairing mode and Zigbee will find them and add them back.
Also, Zigbee uses the same 2.4 GHz band as Wi-Fi. The more devices you have on the same band the more connection issues you will see in both Wi-Fi and Zigbee.
My first step is to restart home assistant. This fixes 99% of the issues whether they are connectivity issues or not. I run on a mini PC and rebooting the PC if a software restart doesn’t fix it is usually all I need to do to fix any issue
Tip 5 – cuts to LIFX bulb… ha
You know what’s a good day when you see the notification smart home solver solver posted… saw this when I was at school I immediately got ready to watch this video.. Keep it up!
3:20 I have set up an automation to automatically turn off cellular when connected to home wife , and turn on again when I leave the network, this served me very well!
Tip #3 addendum. Sometimes the battery contacts don't make a good enough contact (can happen over time). Pull the battery and gently bend the metal contacts so there's more resistance/pressure on the battery. Hav 2 old Aqara motion sensors that were fixed by doing this.
Did that actually say you had 36 updates in HA ?? Tip #8.
I switched to zigbee2mqtt, much better than ZHA – it has better logging!!!!
why do you put the contact sensor on the outside of the door…
I have a fan that will randomly go offline sometimes. I actually plugged it up to a smart and have it on a schedule to it off and back on once every two days so when I use it it’ll never be offline lol
Updating comes with caveats though. Check the change log for breaking issues.
Hello Reed! Such an amazing videos and Chanel that you have! I got inspired from watching your videos and now I am at the beginning of my list of smart things…I have only KASA smart switches, a few Goove smart lights and Reolink cam, NVR…How can I connect with you and if ok tho email you some questions? Thanks in advance!
Alright rant time, I have some WeMo 3 ways and they are absolutely awful I was having issues with them and they weren't responding to anything, not a physical button press or even hitting the reset button. I thought the reset button was physically damaged. So I called them, they answer I explain my issue and how I was wondering if I could get a replacement and guess what he tells me "oh yeah we see that all the time, the reset button is software controlled in the newer WeMo devices so if you are having any issues the only way to properly reboot them is to flip the breaker". It worked but the amount of times I had had to do this is insane, I really got to get everyone on board with switching to Lutron… now I know why those WeMo's were so cheap. At least with the older ones the reset button works
Any method you know to set light bulbs to 'fail off' instead of 'fail on'? Losing power overnight sucks because bedroom lamps will go to 100%
Definitely choose zigbee devices over 2,4 Ghz wifi devices if possible. Large IOT with 2,4 Ghz wifi is not really a viable option in my experience. When you have tens of wifi devices you'll start to have all kinds of issues. With my Asus mesh, 50 devices seems to be the limit. After that its not reliable at all and I also get isssues with my bluetooth devices. I also have over 100 zigbee devices with no connection or other issues at all.
I literally have every HomePod and ATV plugged into smart plugs so I can run a script to reboot them all from HA
Completely agree with this except for the updates in HA. I seem to get more problems after an update than I have before. Unless there is a feature that really needed or major issue causing problems, I am incline to limit my HA updates to once a quarter.
I definitely like the idea of a self-healing smart home system. I am weary of smacking devices on the side to try to get them working again.
Great video man! Much love
When setting up WiFi devices, also turn off VPN.
Is there a way to reboot your router and Wi-Fi device when you're not home? Sometimes if the electric flickers real quick and it doesn't reset router /wifi properly, Nothing works until you unplug wait for a little bit and then plug it back in. Then everything works, but when you're not home it's hard. Is there a way to set this up where that you can reboot router Wi-Fi with the Wi-Fi not working from your router and Wi-Fi device? Hope this was explained somewhat proper of what I'm looking for. Thanks! Love you videos
Reloading an integration as an automation was the best thing I ever set up for my smart water meter (boo I need to do it, but yay it works).
Was 1/2 expecting the end joke of off & on again to be completely unrelated to what was about to be asked
I've spent so many hundreds of hours reconnecting Aqara sensors (Tip #3) I was surprised it wasn't Tip #1. Also, ZHA is terrible with Aqara, use Zigbee2MQTT, I know people say it's six of one and half a dozen of the other… Not in my experience, Z2M has better support and compatibility than ZHA every single time. I tried getting ZHA to work for almost 3 years before switching, I wish I'd never even bothered with ZHA.
I've noticed that Zigbee networks enter some kind of renegotiation state whenever the coordinator is restarted, this means every time you patch and restart your Home Assistant or HACS integrations your entire network is at risk. This increases the likelihood of a device falling off the network without good reason. A Z2M container even as a Home Assistant Add-On will get restarted a tiny fraction of the times the Home Assistant container would. I honestly think Z2M should be the default Zigbee recommendation for Home Assistant setups ZHA really only works well if you're only rebooting once a month and even then…
Also, you recommended Zigbee devices to improve WiFi connectivity, but that's an overly simplified recommendation as Zigbee uses the same radio frequencies as WiFi (2.4GhZ), so multi-AP systems can end up stepping on your Zigbee network and cause serious frustration.
My SmartThings hub one day decided to stop work. Soft reboot, hard reboot….nothing. My solution so far is to just bin the whole concept
Will that Zigbee Smart Plug for a Zigbee Repeater you have linked from Amazon work with Aqara Hubs M2 & others?
We just moved into a new home in the PNW. Updated the front porch bulb to a smart one, created an automation, everything was good. It worked great. For 4 days. Then it totally stopped working. The device was unavailable, but not all the time. Sometimes it was fine. Long story short, it turns out the light fixture had a hidden optical sensor on the bottom, and was turning off the light at the fixture level, but only on bright days. When the sky was normal (overcast and/or raining), or if it was dark, it worked great.
If you are using wifi devices go into your router after they get an IP and reserve it so it never changes!!
Aqara temperature and vibration sensors are the worst for going offline
You only made this video so you can send it to your wife when there’s a problem – admit it!
I have a bunch of those SmartThings contact sensors. I use several for outdoor gates (magnet and sensor mounted inside small plastic weatherproof boxes) and the biggest pain is having to change the batteries, because it requires unscrewing the junction box covers. It's also inevitable that a particularly hard freeze with temps in the teens (F) will also kill even a brand new battery. Instead I picked up some dual AA battery holders, soldered them to the terminals, and now use high quality disposable lithium AA's that last forever by comparison and don't complain about cold.
when one of my door sensors goes unavailable, it usually helps to open and then close the window or door. and yes, i have had an empty battery as well. thing is, while the sensor was alive, it reported 100% battery, and the next thing i knew, the sensor was dead, and only another battery could revive it.
power cycling does not always work. when a smart plug goes AWOL, i have to re-pair it with ZHA. the biggest PITA is when my network smart plug goes AWOL, because that one powers home assistant. so i have to shut down home assistant, pi-hole and my NAS, unplug and plug into another socket, reboot everything, re-pair the smart plug, shut everything down again so i can plug back into the smart plug and boot everything up. a big PITA but i want to know how much power my network consumes.
i recently had an integration that kept refusing to work properly, no matter what i did. reload, reconfigure, re-install, nothing worked. so i deleted it. then i updated home assistant, and i just re-installed the integration, and now it works again.
Great video. Very useful tips. Here is one of my favorites (for Home Assistant) when I have an issue with an Automation or a Button: Go into Developer Tools + States then choose the Entity (in Filter entities) you can check to see if something is on or off. Very useful for troubleshooting when you don't know why an automation or button does not work.
Very great video
Turning of the mobile data have i never thinked about. Thanks for that suggestion
Another tip: Don't just blindly update in Home Assistant without reading release notes. A Zigbee2MQTT update recently screwed a lot of people. I blindly updated but had a snapshot I could easily restore. Which is another tip: If you're running HA as a VM like in proxmox, always snapshot before any updates. Makes rolling back a bad update extremely quick and easy.
Wow, one of our best helper videos for home owners. Thanks.
Set static IPs
Smart plugs, esphome devices, etc.
Being lazy, as an Alexa user that has enough devices to overload her: sometimes one has to delete the device, then turn it on and run Discovery again.
Murphy is not a Law, it is a way of life.
my wled garage strip took a dump last night. It's part of a motion sensor automation in home assistant and it showed off line in home assistant as well as the wled native app. Had to reinstall wled and get it reconnected. Named it the same as before and since the ip address was the same, the automations still worked. sometimes all of this can be a pain but… I love walking into my garage and my workbench lights turn on, as well as the cob light strip running along the ceiling behind my 3d printed helmets!
Tip #0 Do not buy Aqara
. I started about 3 years ago with 10 of those door sensors and only one still operates , they all slowly or rapidly died, the motion sensors ,gave up after the third one . The only Aqara device that worked for me was the mini-switch so I bought more . I would recommend a weekly restart of HA ,which if you apply the weekly updates it happens anyway and a monthly system reboot. The zigbee devices tend to silently fail otherwise , especially with a large overall number of devices.