Since I originally posted this has persisted in two out of four bathrooms. It’s extremely intermittent. All of the fans are frequently used, but randomly, every couple of days one of two will be found disabled and off, requiring an airgap reset.
The other two bathrooms haven’t had the issue once since the original post, this includes the bathroom where my video was taken (but a different on-off was swapped into), which implies to me that it’s not inherently a problem with the fan connected, although I could be wrong.
Not sure if there’s anything else to do to diagnose. I may try to pull out the two switches again, fully disconnect, and then reconnect to see if that resolves the issue, since swapping the switches around reduced the overall problem before.
Mine is pretty non intermittent. At least 75% of the time it happens when turning off the switch.
Over the last few weeks the frequency of these events has decreased, just like Travis saw over time. It is still happening but not as frequent as it was before (now maybe 25%).
I am still seeing it in two bathrooms. Not every day, but certainly having the device shut off randomly shouldn’t be expected. I wish I had an understanding of why it was happening. I’m considering RMAing the two devices in case it was an issue with just some of them (given that some of the switches have never given me this problem).
I’m still experiencing this every one to two days in one bathroom, and more infrequently in a second. @EricM_Inovelli does your team have any thoughts about what might be the issue here?
I am pushing the engineer again to work on this issue. They are trying to replicate it based on the fans / specs reported here. If anyone hasn’t reported their fan model / info it would be helpful if you post it in this thread.
We are trying to replicate this, but have not been able to yet. We have a script running to toggle the device every 10 seconds. Is there anything else that you can think of that might trigger the problem?
Although when the switches were first installed this happened immediately when toggling the switch, this effect diminished over time.
As an example, yesterday morning my wife turned on the fan. It turns back off automatically after a period of time (now set both through the switch parameters and in an automation). When I came in later in the morning, after it got switched back off, the switch was powered off and needed to be reset via the air gap.
I tried running a script to toggle the switch every 10 seconds like your engineers were trying and the problem did not occur even after half an hour.
I then set it to toggle every 10 minutes and it happened after maybe 6 toggles. I am going to try some more scenarios to see if I can get anything more reliably replicable.
I’m not sure what to make of the problem gradually getting better (but not completely) over time as it implies to me there’s a hardware aspect that is possibly wearing out (maybe something designed to protect against back EMF gets lets sensitive?). It would seem the problem is more likely to be replicated in a brand new out of the box switch than one the engineers have been playing with for weeks.
Thanks for the info, I have passed it along. When it gets in this state, it is also not controllable via Zigbee right? Does it still send energy and power reports, humidity reports, or anything else? Does it seem completely “dead” until you air gap it?
It falls off the zigbee network (shows as unavailable) and nothing is transmitted. It seems dead and the LED is turned off rather than the dim level it normally shows when the switch is toggled off.
I’ve been able to get it to happen a couple of times today using 15 minute delays between state toggles.
We have a firmware update that will hopefully resolve this issue. I would like a few people to test it before I push it to the update sources. ZHA and Z2M are pretty easy to manual do an update. Let me know if anyone would like to test it out.
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I would be comfortable trying the new firmware, and hopefully would be useful given that the problem does reliably occur. I use Z2M and have done manual firmware updates for another device before.
Fantastic, here is the link to the file. If you need any help getting it installed, let me know. I just used Z2M to update two of mine and this is the config I used:
ota:
zigbee_ota_override_index_location: my_index.json
Then, in the same directory I put the update file and this in “my_index.json”
[
{
“url”: “VZM30-SN_1.02.ota”
}
]
https://files.inovelli.com/firmware/VZM30-SN/Beta/1.02/VZM30-SN_1.02.ota
Last night, I installed the new firmware to the two out of four switches that have repeatedly had the problem, which went fine. I ran the 15 minute toggle script (10 toggles) that seemed to reliably cause the problem in at least one, and everything seemed to be fine. I’m running some more and longer tests now, but so far so good!
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Thank you so much for testing!
Since installing this firmware, I haven’t had the switches stop working once. I’ve run them through some testing and also just general normal usage.
It’s hard for me to say for certain it’s completely fixed without understanding the cause, and I don’t know if anyone else tried it, but I’m no longer seeing any issues, which is great!
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That is great news, and fingers crossed it has taken care of it. I’ve went ahead and released the fw via ZHA and Z2M (Hubitat soon) so others can test it a little bit easier.
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And thank you for looking into this and not giving up on the problem!
Thanks for the support! We try to address most problems but sometimes it does take some time. We believe this update has completely resolved the issue in this thread.
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Just to follow up for anyone who had similar issues:
Since installing the firmware 3 weeks ago, I haven’t had a single issue with my blue on-off switches and they’ve been working just fine with the different bathroom vent fans I have. If you had this issue, definitely look out for the firmware when it posts to the platform you use!
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