ALPSTUGA stops reporting to Homey until power cycled (fw 1.0.26)

Devices
,
1

Hi all,

I have five IKEA ALPSTUGA sensors on a Homey Pro (Early 2023), and all of them intermittently stop reporting to Homey. I’d like to know if others see the same and whether anyone has found a fix.

Setup

  • Homey Pro (Early 2023), Homey OS 13.5.0
  • No separate Thread border router, so Homey is both border router and Matter controller
  • 5x ALPSTUGA, all on firmware 1.0.26 (no newer update available)

Symptom

  • Homey stops receiving new values, and the capabilities’ lastUpdated stays frozen. In my case this has lasted from a few days up to about a month, because I only noticed when I looked at the data.
  • The sensor itself is fine: its display keeps showing live, changing values while Homey has nothing.
  • It affects all five sensors, at different times. Not all fail at once.

Here’s the CO2 graph for one of them. Each flat line is an outage: roughly Jul 1-8, Jul 18-28 and Aug 10-14, and another that started around Sep 20 and is still ongoing.

image
image1291×499 76.1 KB

What doesn’t fix it

  • Rebooting Homey
  • The onoff capability (I tested it: it only turns the display off and on, so it doesn’t restart the device)

What does fix it

  • Unplugging the sensor and plugging it back in

Detection
I used a HomeyScript that reads capabilitiesObj[...].lastUpdated for all ALPSTUGA measure_* capabilities and flags any that haven’t updated for a while. That’s how I found out the extent of the problem: at the time, three sensors had been silent for about 4 days, 12 days and 30 days.

Workaround
I’m planning to put each sensor on a smart plug and power-cycle it automatically from a flow when it goes stale. That should limit the outage, but it’s a workaround and not a fix.

Related reports
I’ve seen similar dropouts mentioned elsewhere, for example a user in the ALPSTUGA time sync thread who says their sensor loses connection about once a week, and Home Assistant users reporting frequent unavailable states on firmware 1.0.15. This looks like it isn’t specific to my setup, but I haven’t found an actual solution.

Questions

  1. Does anyone else on Homey see this on 1.0.26 (or another firmware)?
  2. Has anything reliably fixed it, other than a power cycle?
  3. @Athom, is there anything I can collect to help debug this? I’m happy to send a diagnostic report.

Thanks!

2

I have four of them. Running them for months and in that time only two have failed communicating with the Homey at some point, but that was after moving several matter devices and thus upsetting the Thread mesh network. And a simple reboot of the Alstuga fixed it.

Both times they were indicating “Unavailable” on Homey, so not failing silently.

3

Start to have a look at your thread network.
Maybe you don’t have enough router/repeaters in the network.
Or to far apart

Use this app it’s great to have a look
https://threadgroup.org/resources/thread-tools-app