Emergency Fallback when any part of HA fails

Configuration
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I see many posts relating to people having issues with things failing during the setup of Home Assistant, Zigbee networks, various devices etc.

I can’t see anywhere that there has been a wider discussion about what people are doing to provide some form of fallback when some part of their Home Assistant controlled smart home fails. If I’ve missed it I’d be grateful if someone could point me in the right direction.

BACKGROUND

This came crashing home recently when our Zigbee coordinator just suddenly stopped working. While I was able to get it back up again with the help of the community, during the time it was down, most of our lights, in particular, just stopped working. Lights that were on stayed on and lights that were off could not be turned on. This situation is clearly unacceptable for those living in the house, especially if I’m not there to deal with it.

So I’d like to open a discussion about what people have done to implement some sort of fallback system to maintain control of their smart devices in the event of a failure of any kind.

For my part:

We have a mix of Wifi, BLE and Zigbee smart lighting so we’ll always have lights in some rooms. The Home Assistant server is part of the hard-wired network. As such, if our Wifi fails, we still have Zigbee lights and if Zigbee fails, we still have Wifi lights. Our lights throughout the house are motion or presence triggered. Some of those presence sensors are Wifi and some are Zigbee. We seldom use light switches, so most of our light switches (Moes Zigbee) simply trigger a Home Assistant automation when pressed. Many of our smart lights have a permanent live to them to maintain power and prevent them being turned off manually, either inadvertently or otherwise. So when the Zigbee network fails, we lose control over those lights. The Moes switches are basic relays with no ability to decouple the switch from the relay, hence why I’ve bypassed the relay and hard-wired a liive to the lights those switches control.

Query

Does anyone who is using switches that can be decoupled without a change to the wiring know if the decoupling mode can be changed if the Zigbee network fails? I’m thinking that if the switch is set to decouple mode for normal operation, is it possible to switch it to coupled mode again either remotely or physically using the switch in the event of a Zigbee network fail? I’m thinking of switches such as the Aqara H1 or Shelly relays for Wifi etc.

I’d bought a second Zigbee coordinator that I was planning on setting up to take the strain off the first one as I’m running 160 Zigbee devices inc lights, switches, motion sensors, door and window contacts, temp sensors, etc. I’m now thinking about setting it up as some sort of fallback network, perhaps on ZHA as I’m currently running Z2M. That might then mean installing additional fallback switching of those lights we need when the main Z2M network fails.

For my part continued:

In terms of Wifi, that’s less of an issue for us, but still something to consider.

Finally, we’re at the doomsday scenario of the Home Assistant server failing completely and having a backup server ready to spin up and take over. That’s a topic I have seen discussed here.

CONCLUSION

So I’d welcome everyone’s thoughts on this. Have you already dealt with it and implemented something, in which case please share. Are you thinking about it but haven’t had the time or resources to implement or are you mindful of it but won’t do anything to address it as, of course, Home Assistant is such a robust system with masses of community support ready to step in and help when we need it?

This might even form the basis of a community guide on the subject (unless of course there already is one and I’ve completely missed it :grimacing:).

Thanks for your time and consideration.

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You broke the first rule of home automation. Manual controls should still work as expected when the system is down.

I’m guessing you have smart lights instead of dumb lights and smart dimmers/switces?

Yep, there it is:

If you want a failsafe system remove these, replace them with dumb lights and smart switch/dimmers. These will continue to operate if the network is down. Only use smart lights in incidental accent lighting, not your main lighting. The main lights can still be automatically controlled when the system is up.

I leaned this the hard/expensive way too.

EDIT: same for thermostats. Don’t implement software thermostats in HA. Connect to a hardware thermostat and control its set point. If the system is down you can still adjust the temperature manually.

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3

This.

Everything in my home provides it’s critical function without internet or other network connections.

Light switch with no internet is still a working light switch.

HA and connectivity adds functionality to that but if it all craters, I can still operate light, turn off alarms, etc. It’s just not automatic and fancy

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Is there really that type of smart bulbs/lights that doesn´t lit from the physical wall switch?

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Sorry I have no idea what you are asking.

I am talking about dumb lights wired to smart switches/dimmers.

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You told to replace smart lights with smart switches or dimmers for failsafe but I haven´t ever heard about smart light/bulb that wouldn´t work without wifi/zigbee connection same way as normal dumb light would, so I was wondering if there´s really that kind of “smart lights” by some brand :smiley:

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Read what I wrote. Do not use smart lights. Use smart switches or dimmers with dumb lights.

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I want our main lights to adjust brightness and colour to match the time of day ie circadian style adjustments to prevent artificial influences on sleep and wake hormones - quite important in my view. Can’t do this with dumb luminaires.

So, I fitted smart luminaires with dumb switches … and, you guessed it…the kids would turn them off at the switch. Also meant the lights would come on full brightness and cold blue when power was restored via switch.

Ah, but which system? Home Assistant contains many “systems”. What I experienced was the failure of one system - Zigbee. All other systems within Home Assistant continued to function. It’s perhaps a moot point, but still worth highlighting.

Also, I did not realise this was a “Rule” :laughing: An aspiration perhaps, but it’s nigh on impossible to have a fully-tailored smart home that works when the smart bit stops working. That home then becomes somewhat dumber in my opinion, but it’s horses for courses I guess.

Our home operates well without internet access. Vast majority of our devices are locally controlled. As for other networks, well I would argue that any smart home needs a local network of some kind whether that’s Zigbee , Bluetooth or Wifi. Can still be all local though.

Excellent responses folks. Keep them coming. Someone out there must be doing something different that we can all learn from.

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Adjusting the brightness is sufficient.

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At the risk of straying off topic and arguing over this, it’s really not. There’s a huge volume of research on quality of sleep that would suggest the colour of light also affects the production of sleep and wake hormones.

Anyway, let’s leave that discussion there and continue this one.

Now that I have configured a second Zigbee coordinator running ZHA, why do I keep getting a message asking me if I want to configure ZHA every time I open the Home Assistant companion app on my device? So far, ZHA is configured and I have 6 devices, so why does it keep asking me? :man_shrugging:

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Ok last post before I leave you to it as you obviously did not want to hear any actual answers to your question and already have your mind set.

My 4000K (dumb) down-lights at 100% brightness are quite neutral but at the lower brightness levels (20 to 10%) they appear a lot warmer. I dim them automatically in the evening and have no trouble going to sleep.

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Harsh and not at all true. I listen to and value every response. Just because our views differ, doesn’t mean our responses are any more or less valid. If you no longer wish to contribute that’s your choice and that’s okay. Just like it’s okay for me to listen to an answer and choose not to agree with it or implement it. Let’s not argue over it though, as that’s counterproductive all round.

Friends? :slightly_smiling_face:

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No hard feelings. I’ve been through this process myself and seen many others do it too here on the forums. Just trying to impress on you what we have learned to save you having to do it all again.

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