Hi @Pz8675309 

Welcome to the Sonos Community!

Sorry to hear of the issue you are having with rooms disappearing from your Sonos app - it can be very annoying! There are a few things that can cause this kind of behaviour - WiFi interference, multicast flooding, IP address conflicts and plain misconfiguration of the network.

So, rather than me guessing what the issue might be and flooding you with technical information - most of which might not even be applicable in your particular case - I recommend you get in touch with our technical support team who have tools at their disposal that will allow them to give you advice specific to your Sonos system and what it reports.

However, I understand that not everyone can call in during office hours, so I recommend a read of my article for some pointers that may help:

I do recommend calling in, however - it can save a lot of the guess work. If it really isn’t an option for you, please let me know.

I hope this helps.

@Corry P thanks for your reply. I have tried calling the support line a few times now and each time there is over an hour wait time. I also tried via chat and worked with the tech for over an hour and a half and he then abruptly said we have taken this as far as possible and I need to call tech support. So that avenue was also quite frustrating. 
 

The solution here could likely be one of the things I have read about in your article and many others. However, before I try any of these somewhat more in depth configuration changes to my router etc. it would be really great to speak with an actual human being who is knowledgeable on all of this.  
 

Have to say thus far I am pretty disappointed in Sonos customer support. I spent quite a lot of money on all of these speakers and when they work fine they are great. But when they don’t and I need help it doesn’t feel like the company is doing a good job of supporting its existing customers. 

Hi @Pz8675309 

If you're on a chat and the agent asks you to call, that’s typically because there are some needed steps that the agent cannot make while doing chats - I imagine their plan was to have someone remotely connect to your computer in order to look at your router settings and use some tools to probe your network behaviour. I understand that this can be frustrating, but there was likely a good reason.

The next time your system has been on for a while and you open the Sonos app to find all the rooms that should be there, please submit a support diagnostic. If you do this when speakers are missing, I won’t get any info from those speakers, which I will need. Then, when speakers next go missing, please submit another diagnostic. Once done, please post here letting me know - but please don’t post the confirmation numbers given at the end of the process, as it’s identifying information and I can just look it up anyway.

I’ll take a look for you and see what I can see - hopefully an answer will be forthcoming.

@Corry P i just submitted diagnostic number 1. This is the one where the full system is working fine and all speakers, rooms are present. Submitted today at 5:29am. 
i will submit again the next time the issue occurs. 

Hi @Pz8675309 

Thanks - I’m taking a quick look now. So I can adequately explain to you what I end up thinking the issue might be, do I have your permission to use the room names and speaker models of your system (data protection laws over here prevent me from doing so without your clearance) in my next posts? 

@Corry P yes. I’m fine with that. Thanks. 

@Corry P i just submitted diagnostic #2.  Room “family room” and the three speakers in that room has disappeared from the app as of 7:30am this morning. You should now have the two sets of diagnostics you asked for. 

Hi @Pz8675309 

Thanks!

I’m already concerned that there might be a Google Nest device in close proximity to your Family Room (RR) speaker - if this is the case, please move them at least 3 feet (1m) apart, to minimise cross-interference. If Family Room is one of the rooms that ever goes missing, this could be the reason why. Also, that speaker in particular is reporting interruptions due to low bandwidth - getting the Nest node away from it a bit should help.

The next time rooms go missing from the app, please try the following:

The symptoms you describe don’t match those described on the documentation where I got these instructions from exactly, so this is more of a just-in-case-it’s-this-easy situation. Please let me know if this does bring the missing rooms back, though.

Is it typically your Era 100 model speakers that go offline, or does the Family Room do it too?

I hope this already helps.

Hi @Pz8675309 

I didn’t see your latest post till after posting mine - I’ll have a look now. Thanks!

@Pz8675309 

Did the missing room come back after submitting the diagnostic, by any chance? I ask because the Family Room is not missing from the diagnostic, which is unusual for rooms missing from the app.

Do missing rooms ever come back by themselves if you don’t try to address the problem?

Hopefully, moving the Nest in that room will suffice for Family Room speakers going missing from the app - please let me know how you get on.

@Corry P 

• The missing room has not come back on the app. Family Room is not there. Strange it is there in the diagnostic. 
• I have moved the Family Room (RR) speaker away from the node. 
• It is not always the Family Room that disappears. I have had the Kitchen room/speaker disappear and also Living Room as well. The issue is not isolated to one room or particular speaker. 
• the Google home app is not showing anything paused. That did not work
• The missing rooms will not come back on their own. The only solution that works (temporarily) is to go into the Google Home app and restart the network.

Hi @Pz8675309 

Well, thanks for trying those things. I do recommend you keep the right surround speaker and Nest node apart, however.

Seeing as the room was not missing from the diagnostics, I’d like to see if the controller is the issue. If the Family Room is still missing from the app, please take the phone with the Sonos app running on it through to that room, and toggle WiFi on the phone off and on again - I want to see if connecting to the same Nest node as the Arc will make the room reappear. If Family Room is no longer missing, please do this with whichever room goes missing next.

Something else that might be worth trying is to reserve static IP addresses for your Sonos devices. There are instructions for how to do this on your Nest here: https://support.google.com/googlenest/answer/6274660. It doesn’t matter what addresses you give them, just that they don’t change, so I recommend reserving the addresses that each device already has - that way, you won’t need to reboot them after reservation. I see no evidence for the need for this (there are no reported duplicates in the diagnostics), but the symptoms do match, so I think it is worth trying if nothing else helps - there’s no harm in trying.

I hope this helps.

@Corry P i tried toggling the wifi. That did not work. 
 

I will try the reserved IP addresses and let you know if that helps at all

@Corry P interestingly after two days and no further action from me Family Room is now back and showing up in the app. This obviously does not solve the problem but adding it here in case it is helpful. 

That’s a good indication of a IP lease lapse and re-allocation. 

@Airgetlam thanks. If it is IP lapse as you mentioned any remedies you recommend? Would the reserved IP addresses that @Corry P recommended solve for this? 

Absolutely. The lapse of an IP reservation and re-lease would certainly be helped by assigning reserved IP addresses. That way, when the lease expires, it would go back to the currently ‘reserved only for the one device’ IP address, and not give it (potentially) a duplicate IP address, if the router is in a state in which it has forgotten where it is in the DHCP table. 

It’s one of those things I learned about several routers ago. I have no idea if my current router can get in that situation, because I’ve reserved IP addresses for pretty much everything in my home at this point. Given the number of brownouts in my new home, it is probably a good thing, too. The thing for me was I left open the first 100 IP addresses for random ‘guest’ devices to grab as needed, and used the upper range for my own network devices. It’s worked well for me for many, many years, across at least three routers. Sure, it takes a half an hour to set up my devices, and was rather intimidating the first couple I did, but once I understood what was going on, it not only became easy, but took about 10 seconds per device. It was much harder learning how to do it than it was doing it, for me. But reading the routers manual worked well, and it really was, once I got into it, easy to do. And in my not so humble opinion, it is ‘good housekeeping’ for a network. When it can be done. I’ve seen some routers (looking at you, StarLink and T-Mobile) that don’t allow you access to do so, which is somewhat frustrating to me, as a tinkerer. Perhaps they handle the possibility better, but not having access to that data in some form is somewhat constricting to me. 

@Airgetlam @Corry P Thanks again. I have successfully gone into the Google Home app and reserved IP addresses for the seven speakers in my Sonos system. I will give it a few days and reply back here in the next week to confirm if this solved the issue  

@Corry P @Airgetlam as of this morning the room Family Room has again disappeared from the app. The reserved IP addresses did not solve this issue. Pretty frustrating. 

Hi @Pz8675309 

I’m sorry to hear that - I had my hopes up for IP reservation.

Have you tried rebooting only the closest Nest node when the Family Room goes missing? It might be worth a try. If the room comes back before the node has even finished rebooting, then the Arc has successfully connected to another Nest node - it might even be worth trying things with the Family Room Nest node turned off for a few days.

One more idea might be to disable the option described on the following page (if it happens to be enabled, of course):

https://support.google.com/googlenest/answer/12495633?hl=en&ref_topic=9832042&sjid=10228425757529638402-EU

If this doesn’t help, I’ve kind of scraped the barrel here - I would recommend that you get back in touch with our technical support team, but to do so with a phone call in the first instance as there are simply more tools available to the agents on the phone lines. I recommend you supply the agent you speak to with a link to this thread (or get them to Google “site:en.community.sonos.com Pz8675309 google nest”) at the start of the call so you don’t have to recall everything attempted here so far.

I hope this helps.

@Corry P thank you again. I checked the setting you mentioned and it is off. 

I will try to find time to call Sonos tech support. As I had mentioned the wait times are typically very very long on the support lines to I’ll need to carve out more hours to dedicate to this. 

I do appreciate you trying to help here but overall I have to say I’m pretty disappointed with Sonos at this point. I am hardly the only one things like this are happening to based on the amount of threads I see on issues similar to mine. I have spent a lot of time on this already and still not resolved. 
IMO If a company is in the wireless speaker business it feels like they better have the “wireless” part figured out. Doesn’t feel like it to me.

Hi @Pz8675309 

I understand. We have recently implemented what we believe to be the world’s first serious attempt at utilising AI for troubleshooting purposes in an attempt to reduce the number of customers needing to speak to an actual agent, freeing those agents up for more involved cases such as yours. Helping you here takes much longer, of course, but at least you are not stuck on a call - you are free to do other things while you wait. In this case, however, it seems to me that a phone call (and probably a remote session on your computer) is needed. I think if you show them this thread, you’ll probably get your case quickly escalated to a higher level.

I understand your point - you’re certainly not the first person to suffer such problems - but there are literally thousands of models of routers available, and now many mesh systems too, and it simply is not possible for us to test them all. We do maintain a list of incompatible routers, however, and Google Nests are not on it, so I think there will be an answer for you. For what it’s worth, I never have rooms missing on my own system, and neither do the vast majority of our customers. Remember that no matter how many threads you see here, it pales in comparison to the actual millions of people enjoying their Sonos systems every day without such issues. Of course, that does not help you with your issue, but I feel it’s fair to point out that you are, metaphorically speaking, in a hospital and thinking “is everyone sick?”

I hope you feel better about it all once we fix the issue for you.

@Corry P

I wasn’t going to respond any further here but after reading your reply I decided to. I know a little bit about brand marketing and customer experience so I’d like to give you a Sonos customer’s response here. Someone who has purchased your products and interacted with your brand.

Congrats on your “world’s first” AI effort and your “millions of customers enjoying their Sonos systems without issues” and all the other things you mentioned. That’s wonderful. Perhaps for Sonos. 

You might want to take a more customer-centric approach here. In my personal opinion I would not be touting such things to a customer who has purchased your products, having problems with them, has already tried multiple modes of support and still no resolution. 

You have all of these amazing capabilities you mentioned but how about something actionable here/now? How about you say, hey, here is a customer who has bought seven of our speakers. They have tried chat support, phone support, Sonos community support and their issue is still unresolved. How about Sonos sends my case to support and then sets up a call time with myself and a support representative to troubleshoot? Instead of telling me I need to just try again (and I can “do other things while waiting on hold”, really?) Surely a company, brand who has the wonderful capabilities you felt it was appropriate to tell me about has the ability to set up a phone call? I’m going to guess you have some rationale for not being able to  

I do appreciate the attempts you have made to help here. But I would recommend against responding to customers who are very frustrated with your products and brand by telling them what a great job you are doing. Again, just one customer’s opinion here. 

Hi @Pz8675309 

My mention of the AI was merely an attempt to illustrate to you that we have already taken feedback such as yours about how long you needed to wait for support, and actioned something significant as a result - this was my only motivation for even bringing it up. My apologies that I did not make it clearer to you.

I think you misunderstood me there, to be fair - I was comparing the multiple days it has taken me to assist you here, with a comparatively short tech support phone call. In particular, I was attempting to say the only real advantage to providing support here on the community (other than that other people can see the advice) is that you are free to do other things while waiting for a reply, whereas on a call you - like anyone else - will feel somewhat tied to the phone call going on, needing to keep one ear on the call, so to speak. Again, my apologies that I was not clearer in this.

That’s a very good point, and I did look into doing exactly that - I’m not convinced I know why, but you don’t seem to have any existing cases or chat transcripts on your account. For this reason, I am unable to perform a case escalation in order to get a more experienced agent to contact you directly. I will soon send you a Direct Message here regarding this, in case you used a separate email address when you last contacted us - if there is a case, I will see what I can do for you in this regard.

You are most welcome, and thank you for the feedback - I will take it onboard.

Hi @Pz8675309 

Thanks for sending me your case number via DM, I've reached out internally and a colleague should contact you soon, if not today then tomorrow.

I hope this helps.