SonOff Low Cost Wifi Switches for Home Automation

well then connect your th16 to a lamp with the correct wiring and see if the device is working properly.

Im not an electrican so I can only recommend the basics

A lamp/bulb isn't polarity sensitive. Digital devices typically are.
Let me say this in a friendly way - if you're not going to take the advice given here, don't come looking for advice.
I'm sure Bart Simpson wrote this on the blackboard at some stage "Mains electricity isn't a plaything...".



Wire it up with brown -> Live, blue -> Neutral and then let's see if you still have a problem.

Live (brown) should be in 1 from what i see.. hire a real electrican.

mine is ok on app and alexa. try add it again

lukic wrote: »

My idea is now to wait for the electrician to double check the wires.
The thermostat was bought separately from the boiler so I don't know how it was wired inside it. And I do not want to make any damage to it.
As I already said I own three other sonoff devices and I have them all wired with Brown to L and Blue to N.

I can finally post picture here so please how my old thermostat is wired.
Thanks again for your help and suggestions.

Your stat is just a mechanical switch really, it does not need a neutral when the temperature reaches the desired level it either opens or closes. It would only need a neutral if there was say and indicator light on the housing to show that the stat was on. It looks like yours does not have one. Going by the regulations both the wires should be brown as at one point they will both carry live current but 99% of sparks just run a normal blue/brown and earth cable its no big deal

I would say no as the Sonoff requires a neutral and your existing stat only has a live feed and a "switch wire" going back to the boiler

I guess I'll have to give up on this idea then and buy a regular programmable thermostat.

The timers on mine never stopped working, the lights stopped for the a day or two alexa just kept saying server not available everything seems good now for awhile

You can make you own webpage to activate units . A winter project in the making. I am interested in this option myself

On another note. I got a th 10 and put it onto a plug. Once you plug it in it will monitor the temperature. The switch itself stays off the whole time but will switch on other devices if you set it up. I have it in an unused sonoff plug that I can turn on between 7 am and 10 pm. That means it will keep the temperature in the room between x and y between them times. Its not cutting edge stuff but works well.

They dont require an earth to work. There is a place to wire it in but it works with or without it.

mcbobbyb wrote: »

That means having your own server like an old desktop or laptop. Does that not mean leaving it turned on

I guess that's what i want to avoid.. Can you flash a firmware and input some cloud based service that you can access via phone and remotly turn on / off the sonoff devices or set a schedule..

theduffer wrote: »

I guess that's what i want to avoid.. Can you flash a firmware and input some cloud based service that you can access via phone and remotly turn on / off the sonoff devices or set a schedule..

There are tons of examples on the web to use:

• Raspberry Pi (on 24/7 running headless, ideally on wired internet)
• Mosquitto service running on your Raspberry Pi
• Node-RED running on your Raspberry Pi (Has it's own UI which can be secured)
• Tasmota Firmware (on your Sonoff devices)

This is what I have, principally as I had all the parts to hand. In fact I have 3 x Raspberry Pi's running 24/7 in my home for various services, two of them locked away "embedded" in other stuff which I run "headless". This (sorry if you know) means no screen, mouse or keyboard connected but remotely accessed either to the command line of the embedded Pi or remotely using it's desktop environment. My preference is for the former as it means a much thinner linux installation on the Pi.

In operation you forward a port (the Node-RED UI IP address/port) out through your router/modem. This is the web interface you see with buttons, dials, lists, stats, actually pretty much any thing you can think of to monitor and operate your home via the Sonoffs. The Pi runs all the time using a mosquitto MQTT broker to handle all the communication of your devices. Your Node-RED is a drag-drop-connect-configure programming environment where you stack functional "nodes" together into "flows" which are the instructions for your home automation. Essentially like; a button press on your phone becomes a MQTT message in your Pi, which is noticed by a MQTT listener node in your Node-RED which then directs an instruction to your Sonoff device, yes, you guessed it, using MQTT, again still within your Pi over your WiFi to the Sonoff.

In fact the Node-RED instruction to your Sonoff is "broadcast" to all devices that have logged on to the broker (remember the Mosquitto instance on the Pi? Yeah, that...) but the way the MQTT message is structured (topic/sub-topic/instruction) is only noticed by the actual Sonoff you wish to command. For feedback, tasmota on your Sonoff (and most home-spun code on "things") acknowledges the instruction with some feedback. This is what indicates the device you turned on using your phone from hols in Spain actually turned on, the loop closed.

Once you start using Node-RED you will find you can do practically anything from here.
Tweet? yup, no problem!
Read or scrape Twitter? yup, no problem!
Send an e-mail? yup, no problem!
Send a push? yup, no problem!
Log any activity? yup, no problem!
Interface with Alexa? yup, no problem!

It is as easy as lego, very like "Scratch" that our kids learn to play with in school (if they are lucky!) only with grown-up functionality. You only need to look at nodes like Pete Scargill's BigTimer to see how really powerful drop and configure nodes work. In fact Pete has a pre-built script that will run on a Pi and automatically install all the components you need (as I described above) to build a slim yet robust home automation service in a Raspberry Pi. It is quite literally all done for you and superb support through Pete's blog and community.



In the image above the blue nodes at left and at right are UI nodes. When you look at the IP address of the Node-RED UI you see something like the image below on a PC and scaled to fit HTML5 style on your mobile device. What you see above is literally all the code you need to build stuff like below... correct, NO CODE!



It really is worth a try, even if much of it is alien to you. A Pi with a decent SD card (important) and a good power supply, even maybe a case will fit well under €100. In fact for the amount of work it does, a Raspberry Pi Zero W the size of a chewing gum stick and costing under STG£15 will work admirably, my single reservation being the WiFi only connection (yes I have a micro usb ethernet adaptor for mine, it sucks!). For reliability wired is miles ahead of any WiFi I always plug my devices in to the router or a switch, just my experience.



I can't be more positive or encouraging than that and I am not a programmer, am not employed in IT, have no formal IT or computer science education and I can do all of this without too much of that magic smoke smell about the house,

Best of luck!

Garry