Vacation Mode - Bulb - How is bulb aware of "time"

I have several bulbs and most are always in vacation mode because I like to make the house look active even when it isn’t.

I’ve read that Vacation Mode causes a bulb to turn on, at least once per hour, between 6-11 Local time. Great! We have one bulb that seems to have gone rogue though. It turns on between 4-9 Local time.

I reached out to Wyze support to Ask this Q and understand how a bulb has an awareness of time. I haven’t gotten a satisfactory reply yet since they told me is that it is based on my app and the current time on my phone. That doesn’t make sense, because if I go on vacation to a timezone 6 hours away I want the “vacation mode” to be based on my where my bulb lives, not the time zone I am at. And in fact when I did go on a trip recently I could see vacation mode turning on/off the bulbs based on time where the bulbs were physically located and set-up, not based on the time where I was visiting.

Questions:

  1. Does my app somehow turn on/off the bulb based on the time on my android phone?
  2. Does Wyze collect the current time and timezone when I first “set up” the bulb, and store that as metadata on their servers. And subsequently then does Wyze “push” to my bulb on/off?
  3. Something else?
  4. How would one bulb get off kilter and how do I reign it back into the fold with the rest of the bulbs?
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  1. No.
  2. Yes.
  3. No.
  4. a) You may have activated that bulb’s vacation mode when your phone was set to another time zone. If that is the case, just toggle it on and off with your phone set to the home’s time zone.
    b) You may have been victim to a recently corrected bug in the firmware. There was a problem where if your phone was set to certain time zones the servers would not get the time zone, and would instead use GMT to turn on and off the bulb (London time). This did not affect everyone. Make sure your rogue bulb (and all of them, really) have the most current firmware update (Account tab > Firmware update). Even though they didn’t mention it in the release notes, I believe they fixed this issue in the 1.2.0.183 (January 21, 2020) bulb firmware update. After you update the firmware you will need to disable and re-enable vacation mode on that bulb when your phone is set to the proper time zone to finish the correction.

So long as you turn on vacation mode when your phone is set to your home’s time zone, you should be fine when you are away. Just don’t turn on vacation mode when your phone is set to another time zone.

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