Fyi I discovered today my Tapo P125M has stopped powering on and off. It is still connected and responsive in the app (both SmartThings & Google Home), but the power does not actually turn on or off, it was stuck on. I tried unplugging and replugging a few times with no change.
After doing some searching I found people in the Amazon reviews talking about how they failed, which was by rapidly and repeatedly turning on and off as well as just lots of complaints about high device failure rates.
I also found lots of complaints on the Tapo forum of other devices (e.g. P100) having similar behavior as I am seeing of just being stuck. Popular theory is the relays were sticking or getting fused some how. I read about suggestions to do percussive maintenance (whack it) so gave it a try. . .and lo and behold it came back to life.
Has anyone else had this happen? I had this switch hooked up to about 2.5k worth of electrical equipment (home entertainment center) so glad it only failed with the sticking problem! Probably a poor choice to use a completely untested device for this use case, just never dawned on me that it could fail other than in a relatively safe way. . .like just not connecting, losing connection, or worst case being unresponsive. The rapid on/off would have been a disaster. Still mulling it over but I think I may just trash all 3 out of caution. Guess I could keep for like Christmas lights or charger or something. My goal was to just give something with Matter a try (ideally over thread, which this is not), and that aspect worked fine, but I don’t see much benefit yet so probably will replace with something Zigbee of a model I have used before.
Did you have any problems with the replacements? The warranty RMA process from the Amazon reviews sounded so terrible it turned me off, but maybe I’ll try.
