Scary v2 hub issue, potential fire hazard?

First time user, was setting up the hub. Only barely got the hub going and paired with a motion sensor. I was having issues getting it to really detect anything (it took ages to even pick up the motion sensor right next to it), and still am. But I hit the reset button on the hub during troubleshooting. Upon reboot, the device started making this strange squealing electrical sound. It would come and go, seemingly with a pattern, but was very noticeable (it could be heard from the neighboring room!).

Frightened, I unplugged the hub. The noise instantly went away, but of course because of the batteries, it was still running. So I plugged it back in to see what would happen. The noise came back instantly.

Now for the real scary part. I decided to unplug it again and take off the battery panel. When I took it off, I could already feel some heat. I reached to pull out the batteries, and they were HOT. Not enough to burn skin, but definitely way hotter than a AA battery has any right to be. All four batteries were this hot. If the heat was associated with the noise, I can only imagine what would have happened if I had left the hub alone for a few hours.

Note, the batteries were definitely installed correctly (the hub would run off of them, after all), and there was no noise at all until I pressed the reset button. I don’t know what was happening, but it seems like the hub might have some sort of short causing it to feed plug power into the AA’s, possibly? Just conjecture. Anyway, I’ve taken the batteries out and plugged the device back in, and no horrible noise. The device is on, and I don’t feel any major hotspots anywhere on the device.

Anyway, it’s late at night and this sucker is getting a call with support in the morning, but I thought I would run this by the forums on the off chance anyone else had this issue. Or perhaps to make others aware that this might BE an issue.

3 Likes

Wow. This is scary. I can tell you I did not have any problems with heat.

Open a ticket with support for sure.

This, with bells on!

Are you sure you used the correct power supply?

Did you get a security alert? :smiley:

Definitely, it’s the only white power adapter I have in my collection (not to mention this is a new apartment, so there’s literally nothing else on my desk at the moment).

I have sent an email to support this morning, will give an update when I hear back from them.

I really hope that this issue is also the reason I am having significant problems pairing/keeping things active on the hub. I can’t even keep the motion sensor responding to the hub when it’s less than 2 feet away.

Squealing electronics that don’t intentionally have a speaker is never a good thing!

Please make sure you do not plug it in again until you have contacted the support team! If there is an issue, it could be a fire hazard, I would unplug the power supply from the wall and the hub and also remove the batteries from the hub for the time being.

Let us know how it goes!

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As an electronics tech with over 25 years experience it sounds like it could be the reset button. It has a small moving parry, usually a thin piece of metal. If that was shorting intermittently it could cause the sounds. The sound would probably be a combo of the metal in the switch vibrating and arching electricity. I used to see a certain push button go bad and do this same thing on a transmitter in an aircraft.

Either way, who cares! Heat, batteries, and plastic are not a good combo. Get a new one asap! And there is no way I would plug that thing back in!

Still waiting on a response, haven’t heard a peep out of support so far. Officially a full day now.

Hey @Fourier

Super sorry to hear about your experience. Sorry for the delay in response to your ticket. I have reached out to our VP of Operations who will be reaching out to you shortly.

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Tim,

really nice of you to escalate this, but shouldn’t have someone already looked at the ticket, determined that there is potential for fire and escalated on their own?

I think they are swamped right now. It’s temporary, they’ve always been speedy in the past. And yesterday I put in a ticket and it was answered within a few hours (was a simple one). Not making excuses, but reasons do exist.

They responded last night. I won’t copy the whole email, but this was their comment on the delay:

I’m really sorry for the delay getting back to you. Our support queue is swamped with questions about the new hub, devices, and app so we’ve been embarrassingly slow to respond. My sincere apologies.

They’re shipping out a new hub and I am going to be sending the old one back for them to tear apart.

Another update:

Received the replacement hub today, old one is going out tomorrow. The functionality of the new hub is absolutely night and day compared to the previous one. Regardless of the scary heat issue, the old hub just plain could not function properly, and leads me to believe there was definitely something damaged internally, having now used a working hub.

Whereas the old hub could barely, after MUCH encouragement, pair with just a single thing, the NEW hub is pairing with things on the other side of my apartment in seconds.

The experience with the new hub is fantastic, so hopefully ST’s engineers can figure out what the heck happened with the old one and make sure it doesn’t happen to anyone else.

4 Likes

A happy ending!

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Quality control is actually pretty good if only one person (or a few people) get defective units. :smile:

Hardware is hard, and cheap hardware is actually a lot harder than expensive hardware in some ways because you just don’t have the same quality of parts or assembly. Some defective devices get through.

If a device sparks, squeals, or has a funny smell when you first power it up, kill the power and return it. It happens. :disappointed_relieved:

Well that’s all well and good, but the failure mode should never, under any circumstances, result in a runaway heat situation. No one wants a product that has a risk of fire, no matter how cheap it is.

Problem is, that entirely depends on what and how it failed, I’m sure a lot of it is designed to be fairly resilient but unfortunately, there is only so far you can go…

I’m sure top men are on it. top men