Does anyone have any thoughts about adding a UPS to the RPi running HA? (the one I have in mind will keep HA running for 8-10 hours). Is there any point?
Obviously I would love to have a new toy to play with, but the immediate excuse is that I would like Alarmo to recover to a sensible state after an outage. All my Zigbee sensors will reset to their defaults when the power comes back on (there’s a post about this here) so alarm settings are meaningless; with a UPS at least sensors will retain their pre-outage values.
My question is… does it matter? My HA instance recovers pretty well from outages anyway. While power is off there will be no wi-fi and no Zigbee network (the coordinater will be running, but no routers) - are there any advantages to keeping HA going?
jchh
(my username is my initials (and my first name isn't John))
2
I do it, but it’s plugged into the same one as for my PC and router (which means WiFi and Internet). It’s plugged in as there was an available slot, but it probably helps the lifetime of my SSD.
I can get several “instantaneous” power cuts (dropouts that are automatically reset) per day in bad weather though.
I bought one of these about 2 years ago. I’ve never regretted it. When the power goes out, even if only a brief flicker, HA keeps chugging along on it’s RPi. Great protection for a very small investment.
It’s true that many sensors, and your internet connection, may also be out while the power is out. But at least you won’t have SD card or SSD file system corruption. In my case, I have a backup generator which I’ll fire up if the outage lasts long enough, so all my sensors and my router will come back. The recovery has always been seamless for me. It’s good to have one less thing to worry about during a power outage, which is sometimes also during a storm.