I don't really have an recovery strategy in place, but what I do have is that all the smart stuff in my home can be controlled manually too. Light switches work just like dumb ones, thermostats have manual buttons and so on. So even if the server goes down I can still control everything manually. Obviously automations won't work, but the house isn't crippled if that single raspberry decides to go belly up.
this post was submitted on 01 Dec 2024
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I've got a decent number of local manual controls, but not all of them. For example, some of my wall switches operate the relay because they are just turning on and off the power. Others I have disabled the relay on because the lights themselves are WW/CW tuneable and HA controls the colour during the day.
I'm wondering about having another look at zigbee groups and commands for the simpler automations in the house. I avoided these because they aren't really visible to HA and I didn't like having two automation 'languages' at the same time.
Overall, how long do you think you could cope without your HA platform before it becomes an issue?
Overall, how long do you think you could cope without your HA platform before it becomes an issue?
It will never become an issue. As I mentioned, all the smart things I have can still be controlled manually. Sure, things like timing energy consumption to cheaper hours and turning on outside lights when it gets dark either stop working or needs to be manually controlled, but it would be more an annoyance than a issue.
And when planning for expansions I'm pretty strict that things stay that way. Everything has to work without HA, internet connectivity or anything at all besides obviously having electricity. Automations are just icing on the cake and they can save a few bucks here and there and offer quality of life functionality, but I'd never rely on those alone. Manual override has to be always an option.
As long as you have backups, the gateway can be swapped, and the Zigbee gateway swapped without a problem if using ZHA or Z2M by having the software run it's built-in recovery steps.
I haven't run into any other issues in the hardware<>software configs that concern me personally. I have a bunch of Matter devices now, so we'll see what a recovery looks like when it comes time for that.
I was thinking about matter yesterday, I like the idea of being able to have multiple controllers. My house is half wifi devices and half zigbee. I'd been favouring zigbee recently because I don't want to swamp my network with device packets, but maybe that needs a rethink. At the very least my wifi devices all have esp home configs that could be configured to fall back to defaults.
Matter comms are pretty light, and use an old 2.4G router as it's backbone with a VLAN bridge. Haven't noticed any problems. Most of my stuff is Zigbee as well.
This reminds me that it’s a new month, and time for a backup. Thanks!