Outdoor Plug & Sharing

Power & Lighting
1

I’ve got an outdoor plug that I use indoors to manage a TV & streaming appliance separately.

It’s worked fine for years and I use it to bounce my parents’ stuff when it goes unresponsive. I’ve also shared it from their account to my own. That has also worked fine for years.

Earlier this week, I repositioned it and also renamed the plugs. All of that from under their account, since it’s their device. Withdrew the shares to me and re-shared under the new names.

Status for several days now has been that granular power cycling still works normally under their account, but I can only cycle the group instead of individual plugs as a share.

I’ve even deleted the devices entirely under their account and recreated from scratch. Also sharing them with my own account again. Same thing. It works normally by individual plug under their account, but the app hangs for me when I try the individual plugs. I can only successfully cycle power of the group.

Anyone seen this before or have any insight?

2

The original experience you described (before you started mucking about with the Plug Outdoor[1]) jibes with my own. While testing something else once, I was amused to discover that it’s possible to share only one socket (you’re not forced to share both) from a Plug Outdoor since they operate independently…when they’re working as expected, anyway.

I wonder if at any point in all this process your profile (as the shared access user) got corrupted and if there’d be any benefit to Account ➜ App Settings ➜ Cache File Size ➜ Clear, then logging out of the app, rebooting the phone, and launching the app again to force it to pull down a fresh copy of your shared user account’s profile and settings. I don’t know if this would resolve the issue or not. I’m just speculating about things to try since you’ve already done a fair bit of troubleshooting.

  1. I don’t blame you for this. I also like fiddling with things and tweaking setups. ↩︎

3

Good suggestions, but I’ve actually removed and re-installed the app a few times already. So that should’ve taken care of the cache. :man_shrugging:t2:

I’ve also bounced between the final version of v2.50 and the latest GA release. (still don’t care for the v3.0 UI.)

These symptoms actually remind me of something with Wyze Sense v1. Once a sensor was associated with a cam piggyback hub, it would not associate properly with any other hub even if you delete the device in the app.

In my experience, cloud-driven devices like to seize on things like immutable IDs and the programmers never consider when those devices should relinquish same. This seems more like an oversight than anything.

4

I suspect you might be right. I didn’t see anything about removing and reinstalling the app in the original post, so I figured the cache/profile thing might be worth trying. I’m not sure what else to suggest at this point. :man_shrugging:

5

Update here… As a control experiment, I’ve deployed a never before used wyze plug outdoor that exhibits precisely the same behavior.

Namely, I can still control individual plugs from the actual account, but the app just hangs when attempting same from a shared account.

Seems like shared accounts can now cycle outdoor plugs as a group action only, which results in unnecessary power cycles.

Is this new behavior by design? Curious if the @Mavens have any insights?

6

I appreciate your taking the time to update with additional information. What you’re describing definitely seems weird, and if I don’t see any input from other users I might try to do some of my own testing this week to see if I can replicate the behavior.