The problem I’m confronted with is that my family has a small house out-of-town but the internet occasionally drops. When it does the ISPs modem/router does not come back online. The modem/router is on a surge protector but I suppose it’s possible that we’re maybe having brown-outs while we’re gone that cause it to malfunction. To make things better, when I call the ISP they say “You’ll need to power cycle it. We cannot do anything for you until you do that.”
My question is, does anyone know of a possible solution that would allow a local automation to power cycle an outlet/switch if it cannot connect to the internet?
I was wondering if maybe I could achieve something like this with a Sonoff basic but I’m not sure how complex you can get with automations on the the Sonoff itself.
This is driving me nuts. It renders my remote monitoring and surveillance useless when this happens and it’s multiple hours away.
My first and most simplistic suggestion is an outlet timer. I had to do that for a few cheap cameras and set them to turn off at 3:00am and on at 3:01am. Down side is you have to wait a day to get it back. If anything this could be the temp until you can implement something better.
Second suggestion is look on Amazon for network power reset or some combination of those words. I have a few I think the one I put at the In-laws is a “MSN Outlet”. Basically they are IP based and when they can’t ping whatever you set it to it will power cycle. You can set it to power cycle after so many failed pings and then continue to cycle until it can complete a ping.
I am sure if u are using Node-RED you can set something up but would assume it would have to be a zwave switch that is ran locally.
Thanks, @hanselljl! I appreciate your response and I will look into those devices.
What I’ve done in the mean time, and what has seemed to work very well and has cut down the problem significantly, was to add an small active UPS (uninterruptible power supply). My thinking on this was that since the modem/router would feed off the battery the power should be pretty conditioned and less susceptible to brown-outs. That said, though, I’m guessing it is a more expensive route than an IP based outlet
Late to the reply but the UPS is overall a safer route since brownouts can damage electronics. I was looking at my UPS and saw HA has a UPS integration and there may be a way for it to cycle it’s outlets like the IP based thing.
Yeah, the UPS has made a huge difference with keeping the router up and running.
I did find, though, that we had/have two issues. One of the cameras would lose connection to the internet, which I originally thought was also related to the full internet dropping but turns out that camera was getting too much sun and overheating. This would cause the camera to kick in a failsafe that would turn off the camera for a while.
Between adjusting the camera, to not be in as much direct sunlight, and getting the UPS in place the problem has been resolved.
Awww the sun, the things it can affect that you would rarely think to troubleshoot.
Living in TX I was in a town house and the cable line to the house wasn’t in a box just out in the open. I noticed that during the heat of the afternoon the internet would get really really bad. After so long I figured out that the splitter on the incoming line was basically being baked to death. I rigged up a shade for it and would replace it every fall and had no issues after that.