Stat disconnected

[paulbates]

I've had an ecobee smart stat and plugin for ~9 month. I've used the built in ecobee features and the plugin, wrote programs and don't think about it much.. except when traveling. We left a week ago for 3 weeks camping in Michigan's upper peninsula and northern Michigan.. and of course the first stop the first night, the ecobee app reports "offline" 🤷🏽‍♂️. The plugin, via UDM, thought things were ok.

It's been between then and now that there's enough signal to do anything and I can connect ot the house pc. Iox also thinks things are ok, if I change modes or fan modes, iox shows a change. I tried turning on AC and set the temp down 3 degrees, it shows a change of mode to cool, but run state of idle. I log into the router, and ecobee is no longer there on the list of wifi devices, but yolink and ring are along with other things are

I don't think I've heard anyone report offline in the ecobee app. I have had the plugin report that ecobee, as opposed to the plugin is offline and back again and that has never been an operational problem.

• Has anyone had this problem?
• I'm guessing the plugin is communicating with the ecobee "cloud", and it talks to the thermostat

 

[larryllix]

I had a lot of problems (using an advanced ASUS mesh router system) in years gone by with problems like this.

Not sure how your electrical grid operates in your area but many use Reclosing schemes, to minimise the area  that gets affected with lightning strikes. The basic idea is, when there is lightning on a transmission line and it arcs to the earth, the ionised pathway conducts the grid energy behind it, and can cause much more system damage. Generalised: the reclosing scheme detects this and trips the line out, with an almost instant reclose (picks the line back up). This breaks the lightning discharge arc and allows the ionised air / wood pathway to dissipate so the grid energy doesn't follow. This usually followed by longer and longer delays coupled with "toughened" sensing, to detect whether it worked and/or there may be a pole down and a tree branch laying on the line. Techniques vary by area and system needs, and Engineers ideas.
/lesson done
 

What this means to my routers was that a sudden and fast blink of the AC was enough to scramble some of the router and device(s) logic but not long enough to make the router see the power supply blink and it wouldn't reboot going through a cold start-up process issuing invites to all the devices to relink to the router.

My solution to that was to build an algorythm for ISY to see some "all the way through the system and back" packet detection and cause a series of increasing length power blinks for my router equipment. IIRC I used a web timeclock for proof of passthrough system and a second algorithm on some local device along with a query to detect at two levels. I found these routers would just forget some devices were allowed to talk through to the Internet at times. Everything but one device worked fine but one just couldn't talk through, despite everything inside the router showing as perfect.

Anyway, I installed counters for occurrences and almost all my problems went away on that front. The counters proved it was still happening but could be automatically corrected.

My conclusion was that different devices had different time lengths before cold booting. It may be worth investigating. I know you are a tech aggressive guy.

Edited September 7 by larryllix

[dbwarner5]

Paul I found that ion UDM that it will show as connected. But it’s actually not running 

I the use UDM to stop and then restart the PI and everything goes back to normal. 
 

I am working with UD on the cause of this and just switched to an eisy from polisy 

 

BUT my point is that UDM can show connected but it’s not actually running 

 

FREEZING weekend to be in the UP!!  

Edited September 7 by dbwarner5

[paulbates]

@larryllix.. if the stat's not connected to Wi-Fi, I'll have to pull it off the wall to restart it, or pull the c-wire from the furnace. I can't see the display from +400 miles away right now to know if I have options, or it's locked up. I'll contact my neighbor to see if there was a lighting strike and go in to look at the display

 

[paulbates]

Thanks @dbwarner5.. and also showed the same on iox. The weather/forecast appears close too, but then realized that's coming from cloud and not the stat.

In the UP we've been to Brevoort lake, Sylvania, black river harbor and Marquette today at the UP beer fest. FWIW, we'll be in Antrim this time next week for the paddle Antrim event.

[dbwarner5]

Looks like beautiful weather next week for the paddle! 

[paulbates]

Asked my neighbor Steve to take a look and take a pic of it.... And got this 🤪😂

It was simply disconnected from the router and didn't try to reconnect on it's own (?) he said no power outages in our neighborhood since we left

It's working now

[paulbates]

4 minutes ago, dbwarner5 said:

Looks like beautiful weather next week for the paddle! 

We hope so. We've only had one "lost" day this trip (starting 8/29)  because of weather. Looking forward to trying out the Shorts brewery "mother ship" location

[larryllix]

I found rebooting the router would correct things mostly. I suspected my older router had too little NVRAM inside and couldn't remember that many connects. The magic number for that router seemed to be around 51 devices. Later versions had more NVRAM installed.

[paulbates]

Wi-Fi things, including this stat have come back from power failures on their own in the past at my last house and here. It's an Asus RT- AX88. Though a few years old, it is over configured for core count, core speed, memory and NVRAM for our current use, 14 devices total.

Guess there's nothing to do about it but find out when the ecobee app can't contact.

[larryllix]

4 hours ago, paulbates said:

Wi-Fi things, including this stat have come back from power failures on their own in the past at my last house and here. It's an Asus RT- AX88. Though a few years old, it is over configured for core count, core speed, memory and NVRAM for our current use, 14 devices total.

Guess there's nothing to do about it but find out when the ecobee app can't contact.

Well that was one thing that made me really happy with Insteon. It was it's own network, own protocol, and not dependent on WiFi or a router. That gave me power to power cycle my router using a simple OnOff plug-in module.
My thoughts were when all devices were initially sent a "get your free IP address", at the same time, some devices just lost out. I could never prove that but it seemed a select few devices took turns not getting an IP address. My worst was my ISY, while I was in the Carribean, contained an assigned IP address of 00:00:00 and the router didn't like that one. It scrambled my whole network until I rebooted the router and then my ISY.

I had three ASUS AC5100 s (can't remember the model number now AX92U?) and the vendor rebuilt one (after tearing my hair out for a year and a half) seemed to work better, the older one short of NVRAM went into a background, low usage, position, and the third was always a problem until I moved, and went back to a single router, without a crippled WiFi Tx power again. They never state the maximum devices they can handle in the device table, only the count per band. With your only 14, that shouldn't ever exceed and limits.

It would likely be extremely hard to recreate it but you could try power blinking both devices at the same time for 1/2 second.
Nahhh..too much work, unless it happens again!

Good luck

Edited September 8 by larryllix

[larryllix]

4 hours ago, paulbates said:

Wi-Fi things, including this stat have come back from power failures on their own in the past at my last house and here. It's an Asus RT- AX88. Though a few years old, it is over configured for core count, core speed, memory and NVRAM for our current use, 14 devices total.

Guess there's nothing to do about it but find out when the ecobee app can't contact.

Ohhh one more thought. My original single AX92u seemed to have weird problems during summer hot days. Even though it was in a A/C controlled home. Placing a Tag on top of it I found problems when it showed over 45c. Many routers I have had had poor ventilation convection paths and mounting them vertically on a wall solved that. Now I have USB plugged muffin fans underneath each piece.