I’m planning on adding alarm functionality to my existing HA with Alarmo and adding a lot of z-wave alarm sensors (and ditching the old 345MHz ones).
But I want the alarm system sensors to still work in a power cut.
My questions:
Q1) Should I run TWO separate z-wave networks, one for the alarm with all battery sensors and battery backed routing nodes, and another network for the regular home automation which would power down anyway. Thus during a power cut there would not be a ‘confused’ network when 50% of the nodes go down, rather one network would be completely off, and the alarm network completely on.
Q2) What do you think to using a couple of “Z-Wave Plus Ezlo Atom USB Hub Controllers” as secondary controllers. These are basically z-wave hubs powered by USB. This way I can use USB battery backup to maintain routing paths back to the primary controller, or a PoE switch on a UPS with PoE to USB adapters. The reason to use the Ezlo Atom is that it is a cheap hub that runs on USB power, I don’t need the controller functionality, just a routing node with battery backup, and I cannot find a battery-backed routing node.
My current physical alarm is a 2GIG system using 345MHz sensors. I’ve come to the conclusion that while you can get some 345MHz sensors feeding into HA via a software defined radio and rtl_433 it will likely have some problems with supporting all my 345MHz sensors. So my plan is to use alarmo and ditch the 345MHz sensors in favor of new z-wave sensors.