Since I’m changing every single light in my home to tuya wifi switches I must make all of the local since I can’t rely on tuya servers for my home to work.
So I was wondering, what difference is there between local tuya integration and tuya local?
Also, do they work as I would expect? Meaning if there’s no internet for some reason (but router is on) or if the tuya server goes down for any amount of time, will all my automations still run?
Last but not least I was wondering if there was any way to check this, to check that they are indeed local.
Why not go with Shelly instead? They are open, 100% local — and you can Tasmotize them or install ESPHome in most of them, giving you a 100% HA-ready setup. With Tuya you don’t know whether you’ll be able to use them 100% local, they change the underlying hardware, and it’s often 100% closed devices.
Indeed I have. I also have Shelly devices, but one switch has e inside (tuya) while with one Shelly which is a tad bit more expensive than the tuya, I can only control one light. I could technically return them but as long as they’re local and as long as they work as I’d expect, I don’t see any problem with them. Also I apologize but I have no idea about the tasmotize and esphome part you mentioned, I’ll do some reading about it though.
Shelly devices also have a problem of space, I can’t fit one for every button, I don’t think they would physically fit.
I’d like to better understand if going local works as I would expect and what could go wrong in the future.
As a side note, I’ve already connected one of them and it works perfectly and incredibly fast (compared to the smart life automation). They’re all exactly the same so there should be no problem in connecting all but as I mentioned I’d really love to know what and if something could go wrong in the future.
For instance, if local tuya stops getting updated I would imagine it’ll still work. Maybe not for new devices but for the current ones
There are Shelly devices that can fit in an electrical box which can toggle two different loads. Although yes they are a bit bigger than e.g. the Sunricher dual switches I have at home.
ESPHomizing and Tasmotizing Shelly devices refers to installing your own firmware on them. In particular with ESPHome they can automatically supply entities to Home Assistant, and can have embedded automations in them, so your switches can work even without Home Assistant being around, or with 100% arbitrary automations. Just as importantly, with these switches and ESPHome you can have Bluetooth proxies and other nifty things beyond just switching. All communications are encrypted always between ESPHome-bearing devices and Home Assistant (not the case with Local Tuya or standard Shelly).
Most importantly, while it’s unlikely that Shelly will betray you, with ESPHome firmware on them you control the firmware, so there’s NO WAY that a vendor can later stuff your device with firmware that will break your integration. This is sadly not going to be the case with Tuya devices.
(Plus who knows what they’re doing with your wi-fi password when these tuya devices are first setup anyway.)
However, even if you were not to use Tasmota or ESPHome in Shelly devices (quite likely unless you like to tinker with serial ports and the like) Shelly devices are going to work better than Tuya devices.
I can’t see how this would be a “side note” as it to me seems like facts related to you thoughts.
If it works now ( offline ), as you say, it will do so tomorrow as-well, unless the devices is somehow “updated” either hardware, or firmware, so it only wold work online.
The last sentence is speculations, a most likely scenario could be that a bomb/missile hit your house, but if you’r @ home you wouldn’t have to worry about it
I do think it’s the same, but maybe i have missed something
Apparently there was/are something called " Tuya Local " but i would stay away from that, always look at i.e. Dates on a Topic, and in specific in GitHub-reposetory, if you are considering custom-integrations.
Installing something that is not “maintained” is not recommended.
So during these days I made many tests. I’ve even tried tuya local since unless I’m mistaken it’s updated even more frequently but has different functioning.
The problem with local tuya was that the integration (for some reason) was unable to retrieve the IP once that changed. It still goes unavailable for a few secs every now and then but it’s acceptable.
I still haven’t found a way to make it retrieve the correct ip, should I be asking someone in particular? Or open an issue somehow? Thanks!
Hi, they’re a bit different.
Tuya local → more reliable, still not 100%, unable to quickly turn on and off because device would disconnect. But if not used it wouldn’t randomly go unavailable.
Local tuya → more devices supported (at least the ones I needed), would randomly go unavailable no matter what I did, could turn on and off as fast as I needed, it wouldn’t cause unavailable status. Also I found this to be faster in automations.
I picked neither at the end since for all the lights in the house I needed some thing more reliable. I ended up with Sonoff mini used locally. After days still no one turned unavailable
For me, the Tuya Local integration has been a solid performer. I had used the the original Local Tuya for some time but like others have mentioned, it was not reliable, with devices becoming unavailable often enough to be a major annoyance.
I recently switched to Tuya Local and have been fortunate to have had no issues. I only have 4 lights that are Tuya based wifi, all of my others are ZigBee and work directly with my ZigBee hub (not Tuya).
I will replace the Tuya lights eventually but now that things are working it is not a rush.
You can check whether they work all local by blocking internet access for the Tuya device. If it still works it’s all local.
There’s no need to compare the two, you can use both. If it doesn’t work with one you can try the other integration. What they both excel at is that they’re better than the “official” Tuya integration.
Personally I prefer Tuya Local with the caveat that I can easily add unsupported devices to its configuration via a yaml file
I have built, what I thought, was a pretty solid offline-capable tuya system using LocalTuya. Until I had an internet outage and I rebooted my HA a few times for other things I was playing with.
At first it was working amazingly - and if I didn’t fiddle with other automation and reboot a few times it probably would have stayed working just fine - but when LocalTuya decided it couldn’t start - that was that. Could not get LocalTuya initialised until my fibre was restored. I was even having a little chuckle before my fibre outage because Tuya IOT kept throwing out authentication expired to everyone. I didn’t care much, because my LocalTuya was running so well. Fast forward a bit about a day later, and you know the rest.
I have about 50 devices, 30 of which are tuya. I live in South Africa, and power cuts are a real problem. Internet is far more reliable than power but here one has to prepare for anything. So I have solar to keep my HA running, but I am now looking to close the gaps I discovered this weekend with this internet outage. A system should really not have to speak to a datacentre thousands of kilometers away for it to start. That’s not local by any means.
In my setup, I have spent a lot of time creating a solid network and HA performance foundation. It’s important if you want consistancy, online or not. I do dhcp reservations on my LAN which allows me to block the devices from talking to/from the cloud - it has been working so great, but HA itself has Internet access to kick start after LocalTuya fails to initialise. Then, all the devices have multiple dedicated wifi access points they can use, depending on 2.4ghz interfereance from neighbours. This has kept things really stable. All the users and TV, etc. are on 5ghz. All the smart devices have their own dedicated 2.4ghz network that have copper running back to the main gateway. From that aspect, I never ever have downtime and the system is blazingly fast in terms of response times. Now my wife doesn’t reach for the light switch anymore because the motion sensors beat her. Missiona accomplished! Except not being able to initialise when offline!? huh?!
So Internet outage hit and I went offline and rebooted a few times to discovered I need to try something else. LocalTuya has done pretty damn well, but without the magic Internet key to start it when it won’t initialise has me thinking of giving TuyaLocal a go. It’s going to be a mission to swap it out, but I think I need to make time to try. This is why I landed up on this thread. I literally search LocalTuya vs TuyaLocal lel.
Hopefully I will have something to add here, when I get to it!
P.S. this is a TUYA thread, but I have come to the realisation that I prefer the TPLINK KASA and TAPO stuff way more. It just works. Not buying anymore TUYA if I can avoid it.
