Since some time I’m having a weird problem with 2 (for now) of my Neo plugs, they seem to turn off by themselves or by the app. The timeline of the device says ‘Turned of by NEO Coolcam’.
They are configured so Homey can’t turn them off (I only use them for power metering) so it surprised me a bit when they were off. Also it was the plug for both my fridge and my freezer, I only discovered after everything was defrosted so that was a bit of a bummer
I made a flow to warn me when it happens, it happens 3 times now in 2 months.
Any ideas if this might be caused by Homey, the app, or maybe failing plugs?
Also (maybe not related) I reboot my Homey weekly. After the reboot all my NEO devices list ‘Turned (On/Off) by NEO Coolcam’. On/Off is depending on the state they were in at that moment. Is that normal behavior?
Any change in the state of the plug will be reported in the timeline this way. So if there is a button on the plug then pushing that button will result in this behaviour.
My guess would be that the overload of the plug is triggered when the fridge pulls too much peak power, which is noticed by Homey.
Another possibility is that the app assumes the plug is off if it cannot communicate with it, which also might happen during a Homey reboot. At reboot Homey should query the state of the plug and change the state in Homey accordingly if there is a mismatch.
Fridges in basic don’t use more than a few 100 watts and then only when they are actively cooling.
So unless the fridge or the plug itself has a defect it normally should not exceed the max 2500 watts the plug can handle (and will cut the power immediately when that happens).
That is of course unless the usage threshold in the setting is altered to a lower value manually.
That would really surprise me, both the fridge and freezer are only 1 year old. That would mean that it either exceeds 2500W or 10A?
I have several more plugs for other machines (washer, dryer, dishwasher, …) that pull way more power and work fine.
I’ll try switching the plug with another one, if it still happens I guess you might be right…
Those power ratings are for resistive loads and compressors are not that, so the plug may be thrown off. Also, the risk of putting a fridge on a smart plug with the risk of it turning off and spoiling both the food and the fridge itself is not something I’d recommend to anyone for extended periods of time.
Well, it worked fine for almost a year and now in the last 2 months it happened 3 times, that just seemed strange to me.
I’ve made a flow to warn me when it’s turned off (for now, until I hopefully found a solution).
I just like an overview of the power usage. Thanks to those plugs I discovered that my old (old!!) fridge was using 1000kWh/year!
