After much troubleshooting, my best theory is that the echo dot needs a minute to fully connect itself to wifi in the morning, though I don't know what to do about it.
Problem: the point of my echo dot with clock device is to wake me up to music; tests during the day work like a charm, but when the moment of truth comes at 6am...I get the default alarm tone. THEN if I snooze...it'll play music (though sometimes it'll throw in a wonky extra alarm tone 30 seconds later).
-Ruled out faulty device (returned and got a new one).
-The main echo dot works fine (though it's closer to my router)
-Music is Spotify (though I'm not sure that matters)
-Have gone through Amazon support, done all the resets, even reloaded my app. It always works when testing it during the day, it just fails in the morning. Tried numerous tests to try to get it to fail (including setting up multiple alarms) but it won't. It's like a sick joke how great it works until I actually need it to.
I'm assuming it won't help to keep my phone in the bedroom---it's connecting to the wifi to get to Spotify, right? Not connecting to the phone(?)
I really think it's the wifi connection because I accidentally "woke" the device (said "Alexa") an hour before the alarm needed to go off one morning, and then it did indeed wake me up to music. I was awake before it went off this morning and I could see the light come on and then a long pause, like it was trying to find the music, then it goes to default alarm. My guess is it works after snooze because the snooze gives it enough time to re-establish the connection.
Why would it lose the wifi connection at night? Is it from being idle except when I need the alarm? Is it because the bedroom door is closed and it's just not able to catch the wifi signal a couple rooms away? Should I try getting a wifi booster for the bedroom? Is there some kind of trick to get it to wake up prior to the alarm time? Or am I barking up the wrong tree and it's the Spotify connection specifically that is idling out?
Thanks in advance.