Boot problems after power outage

Installation Home Assistant OS
1

Hi,
I am planning to leave a Raspberry Pi 3 with HASSIO in a remote location, connected via LTE.
My project is to manage heating in a house on mountains, to turn on heating a couple of days before going there in winter.
I am using a spare FritzBox router I had around, with a LTE usb device. The Raspberry Pi is connected via LAN cable to the FritzBox. I subscribed to Nabu Casa to reach my Home Assistant through the mobile carrier NAT, and it works.
Reliability is very important, given the fact that reaching that remote location is expensive (2h driving). So I decided to test how the system would behave in case of power outage.
Unfortunately tests are not very good. Once in 3 times on average the system doesn’t come back online. The solution in those situations is to turn off and on the Raspberry.
The FritzBox is very stable, I used it as my main home router for years, so I am pretty sure it’s not its fault.
I am not sure it’s just the frontend or the entire HA to be down. On-screen logs are very verbose and I am not able to tell if something is wrong or not.
Has anyone ever had the same problem? How did you solve it?

Thanks!

2

Maybe configure a VPN to the fritzbox and power the raspberry over a wifi switch.
Then you can restart it remote.
First i would check if the raspberry is realy not available on the network.
Have you tried a fixed ip for it?

3

If this is an important system to you have you considered a UPS to give you some time before a power failure shuts down your RPi?
If you select a large enough battery your whole system may run for long enough to be unaffected by most power outages.

4

Thanks for the advice about the VPN + the wifi switch, that’s a good idea.
In the meantime… no, the raspberry pi is not available on the network when the issue happens. I tried to remove and reattach the LAN cable but nothing changed.

5

I am not that confident on using a UPS, for two reasons:

  • in the house there is a lot of wood inside (floor and walls) and I prefer to not introduce fire risk source (maybe I am worrying too much?)
  • an UPS would be a bit too big and the house small, so I don’t know… but would be a good solution
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6

I think you’re worrying too much. UPSs are widely used for home use and entirely ubiquitous in the industrial/commercial setting. They use sealed lead acid batteries which are not a fire risk if not abused.

For a RasPi you don’t need a big one; you don’t need a 1500VA unit. For example this one is pretty small, and they make this same form factor in a few different capacities (i believe this is the largest capacity one).

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7

@ebaschiera The advantage of the UPS (even a very small device) is that as it runs out of battery it will send a command to shutdown the Pi in an orderly fashion so consequently the Pi should just restart normally on power being restored.

8

So you are saying that my issue is caused by the sudden shutdown? I didn’t think about that, I was focusing on the net being down at boot time or something like that…

9

Thanks @Silicon_Avatar! Probably an APC should be the brand of choice, I see an integration! :star_struck:

1 Like
10

Yes…I believe that will be/may be the problem.

11

It turns out that swapping SD card and reinstalling Home Assistant did the trick. Now the system is super stable even after a dozen of hard shutdowns. :roll_eyes: