Plus 1 reliability in outdoor conditions

    Hi,

    I am using a Shelly Plus 1 to control the entrance doors for our car port and am facing some reliability issues. Sometimes I cannot establish connectivity, especially when it is cold and wet, and yesterday the device went into a full factory reset, I had to discover it again and reconfigure all the settings.

    When checking the specifications I was surprised to read that it is only cleared for humidity between 30 and 70 %. The enclosure I have it in is water-proof but not air-tight, so humidity would still creep in. And humidity around here can easily reach 80-90 %, so way beyond the specified 70 %.

    How are your experiences with the Shelly Plus 1 in such an environment? Is there any similar device from Shelly (or other manufacturers) that would be better suited for outdoor conditions?

    Regards, Robert

    Hello the-ninth,

    these devices are built for indoor use. In my experience, they can also be used outside; they should be built into a waterproof junction box, which must be large enough so that they do not heat up too much. However, it should not be too large so that a basic temperature is maintained in cold temperatures. Direct sunlight should also be avoided.

    Hi horkatz, thanks for your input. My box is waterproof and I think large enough to avoid overheating. Not sure about it being too large for cold temperatures, but since the Plus 1 is specified to work down to -20 degree Celsius I am not worried about that too much. My worry was mainly the humidity.

    The behavior I am seeing is a bit weird. Sometimes when it is cold and wet, I cannot reach the Shelly anymore via the network, ping or any other IP connections fail. Interestingly, then if I open the entrance gets via their "normal" remote, also the Shelly goes online again. The Shelly power supply comes via the circuit board of the entrance gates, so it may also be actually a fault of that circuit board not supplying the power.

    Do you maybe have any advice on how to best debug this? Are there any logs that would show me whether the device was not reachable due to wireless networking issues or due to power loss? As far as I can see there is no local debug logs, I need to have some kind of host that processes and saves the log? What could I typically use for that?

    Here is a photo of my setup:

    VIVAH and Shelly Plus 1.JPG