When I made the decision to spend money on a HomeAssistant green device and get started using HomeAssistant I was under the impression that I would gain independence from the internet for my IoT devices. My devices are mostly connected via the Tuya integration.
Today I did a test by powering off my internet modem, leaving my router/wifi and ha green device on, and lo and behold my entire HomeAssistant interface went inactive/dead.
So much for independence is all I can conclude from this test.
What am I missing here? Is a total replacement of all my IoT devices required to gain the internet independence I desire?
I admit I'm a simple user and not any sort of expert. I am normally left totally out in the weeds two sentences into any conversation about yaml, custom integrations, HACs, anything like that.
As a simpleton user, can anyone tell me in plain old man English if internet independence is even possible with my smart home?
Thanks for your time,
An old fart,
Frustrated and left with less money on my fixed income.
The router and internet are related but not the same. HA should work locally on the router even if the internet goes down. This being said some integrations are dependent on the internet as may be the case of Tuya.
Home Assistant can work with both local and cloud-dependent devices. But, if your devices (and/or their integration) need the cloud, Home Assistant won't make them local. Every integration in core is given an IoT class, make sure to check that to tell what will work fully local.
You may be in luck. There are multiple "Tuya" integrations. It sounds like you are using the core Tuya integration, which has the classification "Cloud Push":
There is a custom integration Local Tuya for local handling of Tuya-based devices. IIRC, from threads I've read in the past, there may be some devices that are not supported by the local integration. I do not personally use either integration, so that may not be the case anymore.
There also is another local integration for tuya. Tuya-local will get all the local keys for your devices from the tuya smart life app. It's much easier to setup than local-tuya.
On top of that you have to distinguish between tuya-wlan (internet access to the cloud required, without quite some efforts) or tuya-zigbee (which works nicely with zha/ z2m and a local zigbee coordinator, completely offline).
Hi Graham, to add to my fellow HA supporters: there certainly are ways to make your HA not needing an internet connection to function.
By using devices that are not cloud dependent because of their technology/integration.
Wireless devices: Zigbee, Zwave and WiFi (ESPHome) can function very well without the need of an internet connection.
With Tuya, you just picked the one the, by default, uses your connection very badly.
By using the custom integrations, mentioned here, you can cut that umbilical chord.
One other thing, if you want to keep your HA up-to-date with the latest versions (for security or features) it still needs be able to communicate with the servers.
And totally something else, many internet modems also happen to be the dhcp server for your local network.
So maybe it is just down because none of your devices had an IP address?
Maybe it is better to pull the internet cable out instead of powering it down ?
Its not a 100% reliable rule, but a quick rule of thumb is:
Does the hardware you have, require you to create an account?
Simply put an account means there is a server somewhere storing your account.
If normal functioning of your device requires the app or device to talk to that server, it's unlikely to work when the internet is down.
There are going to be some exceptions to the rule above, for example:
Some devices require an unlock which can be done once (typically while online) from then on the devices communicate locally.
It's technically possible that there might be a device that communicates with a remote server that doesn't force you to create an account, but that would be a little odd - because why build a product like that?
Probably other cases I haven't thought of ...
In my case I have:
Two devices that required an unlock.
4 Bulbs that had to be flashed with new firmware (switch from Matter to Zigbee).
One (Air Conditioner) that requires an internet connection - if I control it over WIFI (I can also send it IR codes - but there is no feedback if using IR).
Otherwise everything I have is Zigbee based, so even if my local (WIFI) network goes down, most of my HA stuff continues to work.
Until people stop buying devices that require them to create accounts, there just won't be any pressure on manufactures to create local only devices.
Agree with Tom, your HA should have still been reachable.
My ISP had an incident over the weekend which left me without internet for 3 days. But HA and all my devices (except my car!) all still worked perfectly.
