For most people I would agree. But what’s a fools errand to some is a challenge to others. I think I’m the only one so far that’s actually found a root cause and resolved it. I would love to see more people solve their issues and document them so that we can develop a list of known problematic devices.
I think Kevin might have been able to resolve 110 issues with a firmware update on Ubiquiti products. But in that case I would assume it was temporary issue and probably a known firmware issue with Ubiquiti. They are well known for buggy firmware.
I think this is unfortunately true of most light / medium weight commercial vendors. I recently moved my wifi infra Unifi to Cisco/Aironet. Lots of issues there as well–but at least Cisco is responsive.
Amusingly, what triggered me to pull the Unifi gear was an LLDP defect in the Unifi APs that triggered a defect in my Cisco switches. Cisco had a fix in dev a week before Ubiquiti declined the defect claiming that the APs were doing the right thing.
I can’t speak for everyone out there. But Cisco has been the best (large) company I have ever worked with in regards to tech support. For the USA, most of their agents are in Mexico and Costa Rica. They are some of the nicest, most humble agents that will stop at no end to help (and Meraki agents are USA based). They WebEx in almost immediately and stay with you until it’s resolved. Most of the time they’ll even program everything in the CLI with you on the spot. If they can’t fix it, a new device is at your door the next day.
When working with UniFi it’s almost impossible to get help immediately. I know most people here are homeowners so waiting isn’t too bad, but for those of us who do this daily, down time = lost revenue = pissed end-user.
It sounds like your Standby Threshold is properly set for these devices, so I’m not sure what would be causing this issue.
Just to make sure we’re referencing the same thing, to set up a smart plug or dedicated circuit device Standby threshold, navigate to Device Settings > Manage for your device and find the ‘Standby’ section.
If the devices you’re referencing are not reporting that the wattage dipped below/hit that wattage threshold, it sounds like there’s a bug here. If KASA is reporting dips in wattage that brought your devices below that wattage, then there’s an issue with the energy data we’re collecting from the smart plugs.
I took another look at your timeline from an earlier post and it looked like the on/off notifications in the timeline were aligned with the wattage graph you provided in your screenshot.
Did you reach out to Support about this/get a response?
@Beachcomber support can see what’s happening on the monitor side of things. Users in this thread are doing some triaging of their own networks, so I’m afraid no one here will be able to confirm the issues you’re experiencing without a lot more detail about what’s happening with your network.
If you didn’t get a satisfactory response on a specific issue or ticket, I can take a look and escalate it to a lead support agent for review.
@Beachcomber can you upload a single screen shot of the power usage for a device that’s having issues AND on a Kasa plug. We’ve seen lots of data on that and could probably draw similarities if we saw it.
The idea of whether something is in standby is made by by Sense based on consumption reported by the plug. The default value of 8w is rather high for many electronics. Had I had not explicitly set the standby value to under 5w, I have several plugs that would wander in and out of standby all day. This includes my cable modem which is why I asked if you had explicitly set the thresholds.
Yeah that looks like a Kasa plug under normal operation. What I’ve seen from them is that they will sometimes report 0 and sometimes report 10x the usage. That’s just something that they do and if you look at the spike vs the 0 they average out to the number you see normally. It’s as if it knows it missed a reporting and then it just gives the data as a bigger number later. There’s a few other threads where people talk about the “every once in a while” dips and spikes. Not sure anyone has found an answer for that.
I would suggest you change the standby settings and increase the duration threshold so that it doesn’t trigger on these brief moments. Change it to a number greater than the number of seconds you experience the issue for.
Yes I understand. That’s the way they do it. For example I had mine all go to 0 at 12:02am on the 17th. Then about 10 minutes later they all came back. Prior to that was a while back.
I haven’t been able to see a specific time that this happens or a pattern and therefore I say random times. If it was a pattern that I knew would happen at X o’clock then I would PCAP that time to see what they are doing. Since it’s random times, at least for me, then I have no idea what’s going on. This thread is more about the constant issues rather than the issue you describe which I would classify as “normal behavior” for these units.
I think there’s some confusion here that attributes this problem directly to us, which is not necessarily the case (even though it may appear that way to you based on what you’re seeing.) Sense could be receiving (or not receiving) a signal from the Kasa plugs indicating they’re switching ‘OFF’. You’ll see a lot of technical network details that other’s have shared above, which is really the only true way to see what’s going on. This can also be accomplished by working with Support to understand what kind of behavior we’re seeing come through the monitor on the back-end. I can connect a Support lead to your ticket so they can identify what we’re seeing on our end, if you’d like.
This thread is definitely an example of “just because the problem is visible in Sense does not mean that that’s where the source of the issue is.”
No one has ever claimed they actually turn off. There’s been hours and hours poured into this by many of us. I think we’ve seen everything these plugs do and don’t do. If the word “off” is used it’s normally to describe the behavior seen in Sense, rather than the plug itself.
While they do randomly report no usage, which as I said is more of a normal behavior for these devices, the issues others had in this thread is very different than what your power graph shows. What you are seeing has been seen, and there’s other threads about the erratic behavior from these plugs including your own.
While it could be Sense, there’s no evidence that it is, and your claim that Sense is to blame is really baseless based on those screenshots. I wish I could blame Sense, they might actually fix it if I had proof. There’s nothing in your screenshots that indicates Sense is discarding, blocking or misreading the data from the plugs.
Let me explain in a different way. If a plug reports no data to Sense, Sense will assume that the plug is off, or at 0w. This is the same as if you unplugged a light in your house. Obviously, since it’s unplugged it’s not consuming electricity and therefore it’s “off”. Sense can’t assume otherwise, no data = off. You are seeing, in your app, the resulting behavior from that data drop.
There’s a number of solutions that are guaranteed to work but the native one is the best:
Change the threshold for Sense to report when these devices are considered to be off
Lastly, let me say that just because Kasa says it is consuming power doesn’t mean it’s reporting it to Sense. That was the whole reason this thread was created. Everyone has always seen where Kasa reports the data, but Sense doesn’t get it. The conclusion thus far has only been that there’s interfering devices causing issues with the plugs and this was confirmed by Kasa tech support.
If you’re willing to take PCAPs during the times your devices have issues I would be more than happy to review them.
Just another 5-day update. All five Kasa plugs went NA right on schedule. The new Wemo plug stayed on and available in Sense for the second 5-day cycle in a row. Today I added two more Wemo plugs. Let’s see how all three of these Wemo brand plugs get along with Sense. So far, so good with the one that’s been in 10+ days.
