About Smart Home Triage
Smart Home Triage is a small, free diagnostic tool for one specific problem: a smart home device that's gone offline, won't automate, or has stopped behaving the way it used to. Instead of a generic "have you tried turning it off and on again" checklist, the tool asks what kind of device you have and what it's actually doing, and returns the single most likely cause based on how that category of device typically fails.
Why this exists
Most troubleshooting guides for smart home gear are written per-brand and per-product, which means the same underlying fault — a weak Wi-Fi link, a dropped hub connection, a sagging battery, a cloud outage — gets explained a dozen different ways across a dozen different support pages. This site instead organizes around the failure mode itself: what breaks, why it breaks that way, and what to check first. The device category matters less than how it communicates (direct Wi-Fi vs. a hub-based protocol, battery vs. mains power), so the same logic holds up across brands.
How the diagnostic logic is built
The tool's results are drawn from documented, well-known smart-home failure patterns: 2.4GHz interference and range limits, Zigbee/Z-Wave mesh behavior, battery voltage sag under radio load, and the split between local and cloud-routed automation paths. These aren't guesses — they're the same categories referenced in manufacturer support documentation and home-automation community troubleshooting, consolidated into one lookup so you don't have to read five different support articles to find the one that matches your symptom.
What this site is not
It doesn't diagnose electrical or fire-safety issues, and it isn't a substitute for a licensed electrician if a device shows physical signs of damage — see the safety note directly under the tool on the homepage. It also doesn't collect account credentials, connect to your devices, or require a login; every diagnosis runs entirely from the two choices you make in the tool.
Feedback
If a result was wrong for your device, or a category is missing entirely, the contact page has a way to reach us — that feedback is how the checklists get refined over time.