SonOff Low Cost Wifi Switches for Home Automation

air · 11-01-2018 3:44pm

A simple scene like this would do the job.

mcbobbyb · 11-01-2018 7:37pm

Great thanks. I Have it ordered already so will just have to figure out where to place it. Want it in the sitting room.

lukic · 12-01-2018 9:00pm

Hello from Serbia,

I have been looking all over the web if I could use TH16 with temperature and humidity sensor to control heating in my house and then I found this thread.
My house is heated with a gas boiler and the temperature is controlled by the old mechanical Honeywell thermostat.
So my plan was to attach TH16 between the boiler and the old thermostat that will be used as a fail-safe.
Today I detached L and N wire from the thermostat and attached them to the TH16 on the input side. From the output side I ran new wires to the old thermostat and attached L and N where they were.
At that time TH16 was powered and switched OFF.
Then on the old thermostat I sat some temperature that would turn ON the boiler, but since TH16 switch was OFF nothing happened.
But as soon as I switched TH16 to ON the boiler started for a second and turned OFF and TH 16 rebooted.
Do you have any idea what I did wrong and how to fix it?
Thanks.

lochdara · 12-01-2018 9:12pm

lukic wrote: »

Hello from Serbia,

I have been looking all over the web if I could use TH16 with temperature and humidity sensor to control heating in my house and then I found this thread.
My house is heated with a gas boiler and the temperature is controlled by the old mechanical Honeywell thermostat.
So my plan was to attach TH16 between the boiler and the old thermostat that will be used as a fail-safe.
Today I detached L and N wire from the thermostat and attached them to the TH16 on the input side. From the output side I ran new wires to the old thermostat and attached L and N where they were.
At that time TH16 was powered and switched OFF.
Then on the old thermostat I sat some temperature that would turn ON the boiler, but since TH16 switch was OFF nothing happened.
But as soon as I switched TH16 to ON the boiler started for a second and turned OFF and TH 16 rebooted.
Do you have any idea what I did wrong and how to fix it?
Thanks.

What happens when your press the white button on TH16.

lukic · 12-01-2018 9:16pm

When I press the white button I can hear the boiler trying to start for a second and then it turns off. And the Sonoff reboots at the same time.

lochdara · 12-01-2018 9:24pm

are you sure L and N is correctly fitted.

lukic · 12-01-2018 9:38pm

I think they are.
I have tried to post the photo of my current thermostat and how the wires are connected but I can't since I am a new user.
Blue wire is L and brown is N. I just detached them from there and attached them to the input side of Sonoff. Then I took another wire and attached it from the output side to the same terminals on the old thermostat.

mcbobbyb · 12-01-2018 9:43pm

It's wired wrong. Blue is neutral

lochdara · 12-01-2018 9:56pm

yeah wired wrong. Brown is Live, blue is neutral. Id start off playing with a lamp cord before jumping straight into your heating, Its easier to learn

lukic · 12-01-2018 10:09pm

I have already attached three Sonoff Basics to the house lamps so I think I did my homework

As I said that is how it was wired when I opened my old thermostat.
Blue was attached to the L terminal and brown to the N terminal.
It did not seem right to me as well, but it worked so I thought who ever did it knew what he was doing.
I wish I can post pictures but I still can't.
Since it did not work with Sonoff I reattached everything as it was and it still works fine.

lochdara · 12-01-2018 10:11pm

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

lukic · 12-01-2018 10:49pm

I really appreciate your help and suggestions.
It works great with the lamp.

10-10-20 · 13-01-2018 10:22pm

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.

lukic · 14-01-2018 10:56am

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.

lochdara · 14-01-2018 11:20am

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

Stoner · 14-01-2018 2:13pm

air wrote:

Go for it durtybit, I doubt you'll find a mechanical switch as cheaply! Just to be clear they work straight out of the box with the manufacturers app for basic applications. Hacking of any sort is only required if you want to run alternative firmware versions etc.

Exactly I just popped my one one 10 minute job. The 16 Amp has rf433 on it too so you could add a fob for 2.5

air · 14-01-2018 4:12pm

Stoner wrote: »

Exactly I just popped my one one 10 minute job. The 16 Amp has rf433 on it too so you could add a fob for 2.5

Is there RF on all the TH16s?

viperlogic · 14-01-2018 9:47pm

Are folks T1 light switches still offline? My smart plugs are fine but not T1

lochdara · 14-01-2018 9:50pm

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

viperlogic · 14-01-2018 9:55pm

lochdara wrote: »

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

tried several times and no luck. Just bounced the trip switch for that circuit and tada, now working! Nothing like a good aul reboot!

corkscott · 15-01-2018 2:02pm

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

lukic · 15-01-2018 3:18pm

No, it doesn't have indicator light.
So is it possible to add sonoff between boiler and thermostat as a switch with the current wiring or not?

corkscott · 15-01-2018 4:19pm

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

GryKyo · 15-01-2018 4:30pm

corkscott wrote: »

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

lukic wrote: »

No, it doesn't have indicator light.
So is it possible to add sonoff between boiler and thermostat as a switch with the current wiring or not?

OK guys, you're getting warm. Yeah, I know, pretty sh!t pun...

The thermostat is simply a contact that opens and closes, does not matter which wire is where. The two wires (irrespective of colour are not a live and neutral, they are merely a signal to the boiler to start or not despite the fact that they may have 220vac across them. This is not L & N!)

Your Sonoff when supplied with a live and neutral feed of it's own switches the live out to an appliance and needs a neutral to power the DC internals which it shares with the appliance but doesn't make or break. If you feed the output to a switch that closes to "demand heat" from the boiler you have a direct short circuit from L to N!
The only way you can have the two switches is to put a 220Vac relay on the output of the Sonoff TH16. Wire the normally open contact of the relay in PARALLEL to the thermostat. In this way either the thermostat or the relay (controlled by the TH16) will start the boiler.
Unless you know exactly how the control unit of your boiler works I would not be trying what you have described!

HTH

lukic · 15-01-2018 5:29pm

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

lochdara · 15-01-2018 5:35pm

i dont have a room stat, My rads all have TRV on them. so i just removed my timer and installed a sonoff basic for now, This has the schedules i need and allows me to turn on heating via app or alexa. But i plan to put the th16 on my immersion and attach the sensor to my hot pipe so it measures the pipe temp and cuts in and out.

OldMrBrennan83 · 17-01-2018 9:40am

This post has been deleted.

air · 17-01-2018 9:52am

Patww79 wrote: »

This post has been deleted.

All working fine again for me for the past 10 days or so, the history on the timers is the only thing I'm missing.

tweek84 · 17-01-2018 10:18am

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

theduffer · 17-01-2018 11:17am

Hi Folks,

I have ordered two of these to have a play with it.. Sonoff have their own cloud based solution where you can switch stuff on/off. I understand you can put different firmware on. I see you can use tasmota firmware and setup your home based system. Is there another obvious alternative clould based solution to switch things on/off that you could use if sonoff decide to start charging us a subscription fee to use their service..

Thanks for any feedback...

lochdara · 17-01-2018 11:22am

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

mcbobbyb · 17-01-2018 2:12pm

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

mcbobbyb · 17-01-2018 2:16pm

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.

davegilly · 17-01-2018 2:21pm

Has anyone used the Sonoff Dual to control their immersion? It looks like it is perfect as the 2 gang option is 16A. Power in and one gang to the sink element and the other gang to the bath element. T
There is no earth feethru though like there is on the TH16 which only has one gang unfortunately. What do you think? Could it work? How would I wire the earth, I suppose I could use a separate connection outside the Sonoff?

mcbobbyb · 17-01-2018 2:32pm

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

CGI_3 · 17-01-2018 2:36pm

Got my first RF sonoff yesterday. Bit disappointed with it. Difficult to pair with, and worse, seems to be just a toggle affair. I.e., the same RF code to turn off AND on.

Was hoping I could be able to pair with a homeeasy device, separate code for OFF and ON.

also, the RF response / latency is shocking compared to data which goes all round the world before hitting the sonoff...

Or have I just got a bad one...?

theduffer · 17-01-2018 2:38pm

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..

kenmc · 17-01-2018 4:11pm

mcbobbyb wrote: »

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

or a raspberry pi, small, cheap, low power. can run openhab or similar and use it to talk to 'the world' and control the sonoff flashed with tasmota or espeasy as desired.

GryKyo · 17-01-2018 4:29pm

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFoA4u4x2uk

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

THE ALM · 18-01-2018 11:25am

GryKyo that look very interesting, something to add to my list of things to look into.

This home automation forum will have to be blacklisted for me soon as it is taking up too much of my time and increasing amounts of money

corkscott · 19-01-2018 3:16pm

I am having problems with my sonoff going offline it only reconnects to my wifi if I power it off and on again but only stays connected for 5 minutes then goes offline again. Anyone else having this issue or do I have a faulty unit only installed it last weekend.

air · 19-01-2018 3:32pm

Could be an issue with WiFi reception where you have installed it. Try it elsewhere and see if it's any better. If not it could be faulty.

corkscott · 19-01-2018 3:46pm

its only about 5m from my router on top of my kitchen units controlling a couple of LED's

air · 19-01-2018 4:14pm

Could be faulty so, try connecting something else to it on the off chance that the LED drivers are noisy and causing interference.

Mylow · 20-01-2018 10:33pm

davegilly wrote: »

Has anyone used the Sonoff Dual to control their immersion? It looks like it is perfect as the 2 gang option is 16A. Power in and one gang to the sink element and the other gang to the bath element. T
There is no earth feethru though like there is on the TH16 which only has one gang unfortunately. What do you think? Could it work? How would I wire the earth, I suppose I could use a separate connection outside the Sonoff?

I would verify each channel is 16A. Also the bath element current, I know it's supposed to be 3kw, but just to be on the safe side verify it.

air · 20-01-2018 11:09pm

I don't think the dual is rated for 16A per channel but the bigger issue is that there is no interlocking on the dual so you could easily turn on both sink and bath elements.
You'll need to use external contactors if you want to use the dual.

Jakey Rolling · 21-01-2018 12:53am

GryKyo wrote: »

For reliability wired is miles ahead of any WiFi I always plug my devices in to the router or a switch, just my experience.

Garry

Until you get hit by lightning!
Like yourself, I was a big fan of running wired where possible.
Then, our house took a direct lightning strike.

Lots of kit survived, and would still power up (seems that one of the mains rings directed most of the strike to ground, even fused a 100Amp changeover switch and blew the ESB meter)

However every item that was plugged into my LAN had it's ethernet controller fried and was rendered useless. Printer/scanner, Desktop PCs, Humax Sat box, Smart TV, Wireless APs, Main Router, VoiP handset... luckily all laptops were on wireless at the time.

I now run much more stuff over wireless :-)
Just sayin' ...

Jakey Rolling · 21-01-2018 12:58am

Anyhow, what I came here to ask...

Has anyone used one of these wifi relays to control an electric gate?
My understanding is that some gate controllers need a momentary latch closure to start the open/closing sequence.
The wifi relay would just be hooked up in parallel with the existing actuator. May need 2 x relays, one for open one for close?

Do some of these Sonos switches have that capability?

Looking to install gates this year and want to be sure that whatever I go for has this option, once the installer has done his bit.

Stoner · 21-01-2018 3:29am

Not on SONOFF that I've seen

I've added a latching relay at low voltage to my gate.

https://lightwaverf.com/power/8409990151

wexfordman2 · 21-01-2018 1:18pm

Jakey Rolling wrote: »

Until you get hit by lightning!
Like yourself, I was a big fan of running wired where possible.
Then, our house took a direct lightning strike.

Lots of kit survived, and would still power up (seems that one of the mains rings directed most of the strike to ground, even fused a 100Amp changeover switch and blew the ESB meter)

However every item that was plugged into my LAN had it's ethernet controller fried and was rendered useless. Printer/scanner, Desktop PCs, Humax Sat box, Smart TV, Wireless APs, Main Router, VoiP handset... luckily all laptops were on wireless at the time.

I now run much more stuff over wireless :-)
Just sayin' ...

Got hit with lightening myself about 15 years ago, came in the phone line, blew a multi room music system, phones, alarm system and some automation stuff.

The lesson I took from it was surge protection tbh

SonOff Low Cost Wifi Switches for Home Automation

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