OK, I am not a normal use case. However I do have some feedback.
My situation is that I am extensively using Shelly products for my caravan/RV/mobile home automation and have been observing patterns of behavior due to the changing environments that I experience.
My automation environment is controlled from custom automations implemented with node-red via MQTT interactions.
Things that I am controlling or monitoring with Shelly devices are:
- Climate control using the H&T as the sensors with four of them in the following zones:
- Bathroom
- Bedroom
- Kitchen
- Living Room
- Cooling control for roof air conditioners via Shelly 1PM's for:
- Bedroom (Spills over to the bathroom)
- Living room (Spills over to the kitchen)
- Electric hydronic heating control when plugged into external power or load dumping when solar charging the house storage battery has reached full capacity and to not waste solar generation, again using Shelly 1PM's.
- Hydronic storage tank 1
- Hydronic storage tank 2
- Power monitoring when running on solar to shutdown the high power inverter to save energy. I am using the Shelly EM with two sensors for split phase power. I.E. If total power consumption has been under 100 watts of AC power for ten minutes; then automatically shut off the inverter as it consumes 100 watts plus say 20 watts of parasitic AC power loads. Note: I also ping the laptop computer to see if it is online with as a priority load.
- Shelly 1's as MQTT power signal indicators for:
- External shore power input
- Generator input power
- External power is 220V split phase verses a 120v feed
Given the highly variable environments that my RV goes through I have changed my H&T's to be supplied with external DC power with DC to DC converters.
Since the H&T are running on external power, how about allowing the reporting period to configurable when external power is enabled? I understand that this firmware feature was removed to conserve battery power, which is not applicable when externally powered.
Allow the reporting period to be altered via MQTT as when I am running the air conditioner in the bedroom due to it being a smaller space; I get big temperature over shoots when cooling.
My further observation is that when I am in isolated settings with no one close by that could cause WiFy interference, everything works are expected.
However when I pull into a caravan/RV park when there are multiple access point in range; things start to act weirdly.
My bedroom H&T is furthest from the WiFy Access point inside of my RV. It sometimes seems to get into a mode where it is making reports (I record the last MQTT event update time via a node-red flow), but it is reporting an older value rather then a fresh reading of the sensors.
Power cycling the device restores normal functionality.
My other Shelly AC powered devices sometimes loose connectivity to the WiFy Access point/internal network for both MQTT and web GUI interactions. Power cycling the device restores functionality.