Source
r/HomeKit•
ReliableSource

Has anyone had half their accessories randomly stop working?

Question/Help

So I have a bunch of HomeKit stuff: a Tradfri Gateway with six bulbs, a Hue Bridge with two bulbs, two ConnectSense outlets (version 1), and a VOCOlinc power strip.

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Recently, I had a brief internet outage, and I noticed shortly after that my VOCOlinc strip and ConnectSense outlets had all stopped working (they'd still provide power, but were listed as unresponsive in my Home app). When they didn't start working again after about an hour, I un-paired them all and tried to reconnect them. This has always worked in the past, but now all of a sudden none of them would reconnect. For all three accessories, any attempt to reconnect them would end with "could not connect accessory."

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I'm baffled because my Hue lights never stopped working (the Hue stuff has been the most rock solid HomeKit accessories I've had by far), and my Tradfri stuff, which has been by far the most finicky, also kept working just fine.

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But now I'm stuck with two outlets and a power strip that I can't get back onto the network for some reason.

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Does anyone have any ideas/suggestions? I thought un-pairing them and setting them back up again was the nuclear option, but maybe there's something else I haven't tried beyond that

Edit: rebooting my router and modem did the trick; I was just able to add everything back. Thank you all for your help!

Posted May 22, 2019, 6:10 PM UTC · edited

710
dawiz2016•

I haven’t seen anything like that happening except for my Osram (Sylvania) HomeKit bulbs. I had to reset them a bunch of time before I eventually gave up and replaced them with Hues.

Trådfri has always been completely unstable for me, so I never actually bothered integrating that with HomeKit.

But anyway, what you can try: remove the devices that are causing issues, reset them and re-add them

1
ReliableSourceOP•

what you can try: remove the devices that are causing issues, reset them and re-add them

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Sorry if I didn't make it clear in my post, but I have already done this. The problem is that they won't connect to my wifi anymore. When I try to re-add them, it just hangs for a while and eventually gives me a "could not connect" message.

1
dawiz2016•

Oops, sorry didn’t catch that part. Sounds more like a router issue than a HomeKit problem - do you have a 2.4ghz and a 5ghz network on the same SSID?

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ReliableSourceOP•

No, they’re separate. But I guess it does make sense that it would be a WiFi thing considering it’s three devices from two different manufacturers that all stopped working at the same time. Guess I’ll try resetting my router and modem and see if that works.

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dawiz2016•

I’ve had issues like that before with WiFi devices being unable to join, or re-join my network. I actually ended up having to replace my router because I just wouldn’t let a dyson link air purifier join the network :-/

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tUpshall•

Disabled my 5g, this fixed my "not responding" issues.

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s400mpr•

That sounds like a good thing to try. I'll do that when I get home tonight. I wonder... since I had to reboot my (mesh) router yesterday, if it was possible that the devices saw the 5ghz network before the 2.4 one and tried to connect to that. Maybe by disconnecting the 5ghz network the devices will migrate to the 2.4 one. I'll report back with the results tonight.

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s400mpr•

The same thing happened to me, yesterday. Suddenly all none of my HomeKit devices would connect, and HomeKit shows "No Response". The only thing that kept working was my Philips Hue... which of course uses Zigbee protocol. I have a bunch of LIFX bulbs, some iDevices smart switches (indoor and outdoor) and an Aquara hub with some stuff (water sensor, temperature) connected to that.

It seems that anything using WiFi with HomeKit suddenly stopped working. The Hue hub of course is also connected to the network via a physical Ethernet connection, but the rest is only via WiFi. Weird, because my iPhone, iPad and two Apple TVs continue to work via WiFi. But a bunch of Wyze cameras also disconnected and I had to power them down and then back up in order to reconnect.

Now I don't know how to reconnect all my WiFi HomeKit stuff. Turning a couple of bulbs off and then on didn't allow them to reconnect. I dread having to reset everything and find all the HomeKit codes again to set it all up again. I have (had?) lots of scenes and automations that I'd have to recreate. SIGH

I hope someone in your thread has a good answer.

1
ReliableSourceOP•

The Hue hub of course is also connected to the network via a physical Ethernet connection, but the rest is only via WiFi

Holy shit, I'm an idiot for not putting that together.

Unfortunately, the only thing that worked for me was un-pairing everything, resetting my router/modem, and then pairing them again.

For what it's worth, I started using this app to store my codes

1
s400mpr•

Thanks for the pointer to HomePass. I just got it and when I get home tonight I'll start entering all the codes. Hopefully this will save me from having to do it over and over.

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