Smart equipment not connecting

[craigjm]

I have just bought a number of "smart" items for the house. Smoke alarms, panel heaters, plug sockets and water heater all that have smart capability through the smartlife app. I have disabled the 5ghz side of my router as they all suggest. Set them all to discovery mode where the lights flash rapidly but the app cant find any of them. Try the secondary connection route same thing no matter what I try. Router is a BT smart hub 2. Any suggestions?

Edited by craigjm on Thursday 3rd June 23:03

[anonymoususer]

A home hub 2 is ancient and you should get something more modern really
tbh I would bring them right near to the router if at all possible and see what happens
If its a Smart hub 2 its very recent

OLD



Very recent

[craigjm]

Sorry yes meant smart hub 2. Edited the post now. The hub is 3 months old

[anonymoususer]

craigjm said:

Sorry yes meant smart hub 2. Edited the post now. The hub is 3 months old

You could look at renaming your 2.4ghz band and seeing what its set at.

[craigjm]

anonymoususer said:

craigjm said:

Sorry yes meant smart hub 2. Edited the post now. The hub is 3 months old

You could look at renaming your 2.4ghz band and seeing what its set at.

How do you rename a band?

[anonymoususer]

There should be an option in the menu. Maybe under advanced I think fro memory the default setting is that both bands have same name and you have to untick something . then save/ then rename

[craigjm]

anonymoususer said:

There should be an option in the menu. Maybe under advanced I think fro memory the default setting is that both bands have same name and you have to untick something . then save/ then rename

Have just googled that and apparently you could do that on the old home hubs but not on the smart hubs. This is done to work with the extender discs apparently

[xeny]

If you've got WPA3, particularly PMF enabled, disable that.

[alorotom]

craigjm said:

anonymoususer said:

craigjm said:

Sorry yes meant smart hub 2. Edited the post now. The hub is 3 months old

You could look at renaming your 2.4ghz band and seeing what its set at.

How do you rename a band?

You'll need to select to separate your 2.4 and 5ghz networks - naming each accordingly - and connect the smart devices to probably the 2.4 - most smart devices only use 2.4 ranges.

Alternatively, what I did (as I have the same issue) was to get an old MiFi router (that is just 2.4) that was lying around (picked up years ago in CEX for £10) and set this up as a WIFI extender to the BT Hub and connect all smart devices to that to keep them hyper-localised.

[craigjm]

alorotom said:

You'll need to select to separate your 2.4 and 5ghz networks - naming each accordingly - and connect the smart devices to probably the 2.4 - most smart devices only use 2.4 ranges.

Yes they do use 2.4 so you switch off 5 when trying to set it up. You cant name them on the new hubs. 5 is switched off forcing everything onto 2.4 but its still not happy

[egomeister]

craigjm said:

I have just bought a number of "smart" items for the house. Smoke alarms, panel heaters, plug sockets and water heater all that have smart capability through the smartlife app. I have disabled the 5ghz side of my router as they all suggest. Set them all to discovery mode where the lights flash rapidly but the app cant find any of them. Try the secondary connection route same thing no matter what I try. Router is a BT smart hub 2. Any suggestions?

Edited by craigjm on Thursday 3rd June 23:03

Are the devices actually wifi? A lot of the Chinese kit has to go through a separate hub I think. (Zigbee?)

[Ronstein]

You should also be aware that most home smart devices have little or no security, so your home network will be more vulnerable with them connected.

https://www.kaspersky.co.uk/resource-center/threat...

[QuartzDad]

Check that your Smart Hub is running v0.26.04.04227 firmware, it fixed an issue with 2.4GHz devices not connecting.

https://community.bt.com/t5/BT-Devices/2-4GHZ-and-...

[ARHarh]

My experience with the BT home hub and lots of things connected was that once you got to 25 or so ip addresses allocated it started to have trouble keeping everything connected. I would count up how many things you have connected. The smart life app normally works fine, most stuff I believe is esp8266 based which are very reliable.

I would check the router 2.4 setting and make sure they are separate to the 5ghz.
Reset your smart device.
Try to connect again.

If this does not work

run the app on a different device, as the connect process connects the device app devices Wi-Fi to the smart devices Wi-Fi hotspot and some phones can have trouble switching between Wi-Fi connections

[craigjm]

egomeister said:

Are the devices actually wifi? A lot of the Chinese kit has to go through a separate hub I think. (Zigbee?)

Yes they are all Wi-fi

[craigjm]

Ronstein said:

You should also be aware that most home smart devices have little or no security, so your home network will be more vulnerable with them connected.

https://www.kaspersky.co.uk/resource-center/threat...

I’m aware of that thanks

[craigjm]

QuartzDad said:

Check that your Smart Hub is running v0.26.04.04227 firmware, it fixed an issue with 2.4GHz devices not connecting.

https://community.bt.com/t5/BT-Devices/2-4GHZ-and-...

It’s is on that version

[craigjm]

ARHarh said:

My experience with the BT home hub and lots of things connected was that once you got to 25 or so ip addresses allocated it started to have trouble keeping everything connected. I would count up how many things you have connected. The smart life app normally works fine, most stuff I believe is esp8266 based which are very reliable.

I would check the router 2.4 setting and make sure they are separate to the 5ghz.
Reset your smart device.
Try to connect again.

If this does not work

run the app on a different device, as the connect process connects the device app devices Wi-Fi to the smart devices Wi-Fi hotspot and some phones can have trouble switching between Wi-Fi connections

I will try it from a different device later. There are 5 items logged into the router right now so it’s not overload stopping the new stuff

Edited by craigjm on Friday 4th June 12:28

[ARHarh]

craigjm said:

ARHarh said:

My experience with the BT home hub and lots of things connected was that once you got to 25 or so ip addresses allocated it started to have trouble keeping everything connected. I would count up how many things you have connected. The smart life app normally works fine, most stuff I believe is esp8266 based which are very reliable.

I would check the router 2.4 setting and make sure they are separate to the 5ghz.
Reset your smart device.
Try to connect again.

If this does not work

run the app on a different device, as the connect process connects the device app devices Wi-Fi to the smart devices Wi-Fi hotspot and some phones can have trouble switching between Wi-Fi connections

I will try it from a different device later. There are 5 items logged into the router right now so it’s not overload stopping the new stuff

Edited by craigjm on Friday 4th June 12:28

When trying to connect to smart item check out what your phones wifi is doing you should see it connect to the smart device. If it doesn't you should see the smart device in your wifi list, connect to it manually. What make of device are you trying to connect to? I have 45 esp based devices from various manufacturers here, and have probably suffered all the issues possible.