I have couple devices connected to standard power sockets, e.g. philips lights and mill heaters, and I regularly turn off the power to these devices using the standard power switches.
When a device looses power, Homey is not able to reach it.
Homey assumes the state of the lights or heaters is still the same (on) and it shows the devices as on and counts the power usage for them.
How to solve this situation? Is there a setting in Homey where I can say that a given device should be treated as being turned off if Homey cannot reach it? It seems like a quite basic scenario, but I havenât been able to find such setting. Using virtual devices and constant polling using flows seems excessive to be considered a good workaround.
Just donât âŚ
There is no option in Homey to solve it,
just what you describe as workarounds,
but imho you should fix it at the source,
just donât switch off Smart devices (it is bad for fe your Zigbee and Z-wave Mesh networks.)
That is simply not possible. The house has standard power switches and sockets.
Now I wonder about the few smart sockets I have plugged into the standard sockets, for devices that I only want on occasionally. Does Homey also continue to count the power from the smart socket after I turn off the power coming to that socket?
The answer to my own question seems to be ânoâ. I am guessing that it is because the smart socket reports the power usage to Homey, which is a different measurement mechanism from specifying power usage on a heater or a bulb, which is counted all the time Homey thinks the devices are turned on.
Even stranger things are going on. The bulb was turned off all night, while Homey shows the above power usage. One of them is virtual, representing the other one.
I think it would be beneficial to users if Homey did pull status from mains powered devices, like bulbs and heaters, and if the contacting fails, to mark the devices automatically as being off (if selected by the user as an option).
Homey unfortunately hasnât got a âmark as offline after x minutes of inactivityâ setting for most devices.
The manually entered power usage values (either done by you, or an app) are just a âtrickâ to make it look smart.
To me itâs a useless part of Homey which doesnât make sense to me.
You can post your ideas and requests at the âIdeas and suggestionsâ category, and/or contact homey.app/support
On the developer pages it shows when Zigbee of Zwave devices couldnât be reached for a longer period.
I.m.h.o. it is not wise to set the status of a device automatically to OFF if the device is not able to respond. In some cases it could still show the OFF status when the power is restored (depending on the device). And then you think it is OFF while it really is ON, which in some cases could have very unwanted results (switching heating etc).
