I’ve set up an HA Yellow PoE box and have turned off the red and yellow LEDs but left the green one on and I’ve noticed that even in the middle of the night when nothing’s running it’s blinking every second (with occasional bursts of other activity). It literally never stops, and is also constantly communicating with the PoE switch (if the switch port light is any indicator). Is this normal? I assume it’s basically constantly polling wifi and Zigbee devices, but I’m curious if there’s a way to tell it to essentially shut down during certain hours when nothing will be using HA.
That’s how network devices work. I would not shut it down at off hours, Home Assistant is meant to run 24/7. Even if you don’t use it actively at certain hours it sends and receives data.
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If you really insisted on doing this, there are creative ways to do it. I’ve done variations of this for different purposes, for example:
- Get an ESP outlet, such as a Kauf plug
- Change the ESP programming to power down for a set period of time (wait / timer)
- Coordinate an actual host shutdown of your HA system (using the services that you can call from automation) with sending a signal to the Kauf to power down for X minutes/hours/etc
- If you are on a system that allows HA to fully start on getting power, such as an rPi, the Kauf will bring HA back up fully when the Kauf times out
The one downside you will want to consider is getting HA backups during the day. For me, and I suspect for most people, it makes more sense to back up at night when things are slower and it’s less likely to have any sort of impact on your home automation.
Setting up the Kauf will be the tricky part if you are new to HA. You need to set it up to delay a power down (i.e., get a signal from HA to power down, then wait 5 minutes) and then auto power up again after your set time. The rest is pretty simple.
Or… put tape over the LED that is bothering you 
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This. You would be flabbergasted at how much data traverses the network just to say ‘hey I’m still here!’
If it bothers you do the tape thing. Literally anything else will impact function somehow and it’s a bad idea.
Powering down your Zigbee coordinator at night has 2 bad side-effects
- your battery-powered Zigbee devices will eat batteries, because they will search the whole night for the coordinator
- your mesh has to be rebuild when powering up your coordinator, causing delays in the operating of your Zigbee devices while that is happening.
It doesn’t really bother me, although the ping-every-second thing seems a bit redundant 24/7 and I guess if I were to modify it I’d prefer it to stay awake but ping every minute or every five minutes during certain hours. Not sure if that’s possible.
As for turning off the greed LED, that can be easily done in the settings panel (how I turned the red and yellow LEDs off)
Every second? It’s doing a LOT more than that I can assure you.