Anyone else seeing a lot of smart devices fail unexpectedly? (update: found, learn from my fail)
My house is a test bed of hellish proportions. I have, at last count, 60 something things on WiFi at times. This includes 10 smart lights and switches in the basement, a couple of exterior lights, maybe 7 tablets, a couple of TVs, phones, wife’s laptop, some security cameras, and generally what you’d expect a reviewer who doesn’t sell products to have sitting around after 7 years.
TL;DR – article posted, discovered source after, updated at the bottom, I’m blaming Linksys.
A lot of different brands of smart plug and bulb failed in the last week. By a lot, I’m guessing 5 smart light bulbs and two switches all just went away. Google says they’re offline, the Smart Life app says they’re offline. I attempt to re-pair them using standard setup and they cannot be paired, found, etc.
I’d initially thought this was because of a relatively recent router change, but as I can’t even see them to re-pair them I’m really a bit on the “what the holy hell happened to 3 brands of Smart Devices.”
I’ll update if I find anything here, but yeah, 7 devices in the same week, two or three weeks after switching the main router which doesn’t seem to be the culprit as I can’t even see them when I put them in reprogram mode.
Two other bulbs I just had to turn off and on again but something appeared to have happened to them. I’m suspecting a firmware update or there’s something dark and evil in my new router that somehow is screwing with their ability to switch into programming mode. Or 7 things broke at once.
Update: it was the EA9500 router – evidently it’s capped at about 47 devices. This does not have to do with DHCP LAN assignments which I’ve got set at 149 or whatever the highest number it allowed was. My guess is the 7 devices were the longest between retries to connect and were getting booted. Switched back to my ancient Portal router and back in business.
As for why I couldn’t see them, chances are because they were on the network I was attempting to join and the software just was not having it.
Checking how many connected devices got in here in a week and it’s… five… got a couple of laptops from work I’m working on, two review things, and I brought an ancient evil from the drawer of failed products back to life… pushed it over the edge I’m guessing.
