That's been my experience as well. My Meross switch was working fine until I switched to WPA3 security - couldn't get it to work until I dropped back to WPA2.
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Review: Meross Offers Affordable, Hub-Free HomeKit Smart Lighting Solutions
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I have the "Ambient Light", it works well until I changed the router. I cannot find the way to get it back to work now.
The annoying part for these accessories is that the way to activate/connect to the wifi is different from each other, like turn on/off switch a few times or push on the button for quite a few seconds. Only adding them to the home app is definitely not enough (for example, the Ambient Light). It means you have to keep all the manuals for them. sometimes the manual also confuse me.
The annoying part for these accessories is that the way to activate/connect to the wifi is different from each other, like turn on/off switch a few times or push on the button for quite a few seconds. Only adding them to the home app is definitely not enough (for example, the Ambient Light). It means you have to keep all the manuals for them. sometimes the manual also confuse me.
I know I'm a broken record on this point, but I've had excellent experiences with Sylvania bulbs and outlets that are available at Menard's, solid HomeKit lighting options that are never reviewed in this forum or cnet. Between a remote vacation home with frequent outages and a main residence in a major urban center, all work almost perfectly in HomeKit networks without any hub nonsense. Indeed, Sylvania outlets were my first smart home accessories, and I've found no reason to switch. Maybe once/yr I need to re-do a seemingly corrupted automation on a bulb or outlet — suggesting the problem is with HomeKit as I never need to delete and reload that accessory — but they're otherwise super-reliable. This is in stark contrast to horrible experiences with Chamberlain (garage door) and iDevices (outdoor outlet).
While I'm pitching for fav HomeKit products... Although tricky to get working initially, the Netatmo weather system is awesome in first 2 mos of use, especially when used in conjunction with myatmo app that supports iPhone widgets and Apple Watch complications. Preliminary results with two Ecobee 3 Lite thermostats are mostly fantastic, but either or both units now occasionally show "No Response" in HomeKit, despite working fine on the Ecobee app. Gotta resolve that!
While I'm pitching for fav HomeKit products... Although tricky to get working initially, the Netatmo weather system is awesome in first 2 mos of use, especially when used in conjunction with myatmo app that supports iPhone widgets and Apple Watch complications. Preliminary results with two Ecobee 3 Lite thermostats are mostly fantastic, but either or both units now occasionally show "No Response" in HomeKit, despite working fine on the Ecobee app. Gotta resolve that!
Why is HomeKit pairing still an issue several years after it started with a fresh slate with an opportunity to clean up IoT? It’s embarrassing. Require accessory vendors to have 5ghz chips in their products already.
And get rid of this ridiculous tile interface so I can see the status of all devices on one page in dark mode with green, red, and yellow status lights.
And get rid of this ridiculous tile interface so I can see the status of all devices on one page in dark mode with green, red, and yellow status lights.
I have a similar weird experience with an Onvis light strip, seemingly around the same time every night.
How do you go about blocking it? I'm using an Asus router.
Our Meross LED strips are less than a year old and already have multiple failed LEDs in them. Wouldn’t buy another Meross product based on this.
There is more to life than price!
Meross' are horrible horrible products. Constant outages, slow reaction (because not local control) poor integration with HomeKit, terrible app, very painful to set up if you have a combined 5+2.4GHz WiFi, etc etc.
Sure, buy them because they're cheap, tell me I'm a terrible person for criticizing them. But don't come crying to me in three months when you find you despise the product and hate it every time you have to interact with it...
Not just Chinese devices. Devices that need to communicate over the internet for any state change tend to be intensely problematic in all sorts of ways that you only discover after a few months.
Wyze is the same, though Canada-based. They mostly work (better than Meross, anyway) and are cheap, but they fail in weird ways and then you have to power cycle them (or worse, like reset and reinstall them, oh god, including recreating all scenes and automations) to get them working again.
I have 5 of their devices and haven’t experienced a single issue.
Neither of our anecdotes proves anything; Don’t take a single commenter’s post/opinion as gospel truth.
We love our Meross light switches, smart bulbs, and smart switches. They just work perfectly, for us. No latency, no disconnects, nothing but smooth sailing.
Good luck...
Nanoleaf Essentials is another brand that sounds too good to be true -- because it isn't true.
You'd think with Thread they couldn't screw up. You'd be wrong!
Of my three Essentials bulbs, one is flawless, one required three rounds of "reset, try to update, reset again" before a firmware update would take, and one has just disconnected from reality (cannot be seen by either the Nanoleaf app or any other Thread-based app) and refuses to return to us no matter what I try.
Home+ is an even better app for creating and organizing Scenes and Automations. It's not perfect, in either the UI or a distressing number of bugs, but I've found it overall a better/more powerful tool than the Eve app.
The worst thing about trying to find HomeKit devices on Amazon is that Amazon goes ahead and shows you items that only support Alexa, even if you include HomeKit in your search terms (and I suspect that’s on purpose).
I've only used the outlet plugs and a wall switch (married to a motion sensor.) I've had great results, and am going to buy another motion detector/wall switch soon.
I did experience two issues, both which were discussed here:
I did experience two issues, both which were discussed here:
- 2.4 GHz network only. I suspect many competitors can work on both 2.4/5 easing set-up issues. As someone else mentioned, I had to modify my wireless configuration to allow a 2.4 unique connection to get these to work. I lost a fair amount of time figuring this out, however the information was clear. It was ultimately a user error!
- Homekit saying updating. It turns out there was a firmware update to solve for this. The firmware can only be upgraded within the meross app. I had never downloaded it as I set-up everything directly in home kit.
When I buy a new HomeKit accessory from a brand I haven’t purchased from before, I always download their app just for the firmware updates. That’s my biggest HomeKit protip.
Really, though, the biggest issue I have with most smart bulb brands is the hub. If I were heavily invested in Hue smart appliances, especially using more than just bulbs, I could probably justify sparing an outlet for a hub. I have a bedroom in a multi bedroom apartment, so all I really use home automation for is light and climate control. It appears that Phillips has a Hue branded smart outlet, motion sensor, and smart button, but I can get versions of those from decent firms at the same price as the Philips offering, and I don’t need to spare the extra money, outlet, and surface area for the bridge/hub. I can just add them to HomeKit right out of the packaging, while the Philips solution seems to add a lot of complexity for little advantage. But none of the big name firms use Wi-Fi or Bluetooth for their bulbs, they’re content to nickel and dime you (not to mention vendor lock-in) for their hub. The hub is great if you’ve already got a investment in Zigbee devices and are adding a HomeKit hub, not so much if you’re starting from scratch and using a HomeKit hub (like a HomePod or Apple TV) as your home automation controller. In the second case, the hub lets you use a wider range of brands, sure, but the downside is the additional complexity of maintaining the Zigbee system and getting it to work with HomeKit. I wouldn’t expect mainstream users to use HomeBridge to connect older home automation equipment to HomeKit, and maintaining a Zigbee bridge is a little like that.
I have the ambient light lamp. It works great. Not a huge range of colors, but more than enough for my needs and it works flawlessly with Homekit. I got it for under $40 too, well worth the price.
yup — happens all the time. you get excited about a product and then realize it's not for you
