What if you Rasberry Pi goes down?

Hello! I have been thinking about replacing all my bulbs from Tuya to Zigbee based bulbs, but then I was thinking about what would happen if I was away and my Rasberry Pi breaks down? I use the LocalTuya integration so it is local but if it would break down I would still be able to use the bulbs from the cloud with the Tuya app. If it would all be Zigbee my wife would be left in the dark, so that would really suck. Does anyone have a good back-up solution with Zigbee setup that runs on a local server? What if you server goes down when you are away? To bad for the other people in your household?

Even if zigbee goes down, you can still go back to stone age using the switches on the wall. They will work like normal lights. Is that what you’re asking?

Depending on your budget there’s options to solve this. Better hardware with redundancy, virtualizing / containerizing HA, UPS and so on. You will probably have single points of failure anyway.

One way to “fix” Zigbee failing is using physical switches so that you can toggle lights with the Zigbee network (or HA) being down. If you are not invested in smart bulbs already, I would recommend looking at in-wall Zigbee dimmers/switches that control dumb bulbs.

If the bulbs is toggled off there is no way I could use the wall switch to turn them on?

Depending on the settings (power restored behavior) you can have Zigbee bulbs turn on (or not) after you flick the switch. But it’s not a good idea to have a Zigbee network where devices randomly are turned off so that they don’t respond to network traffic. Zigbee devices that route traffic should always be powered.

So it really seems that it is way better to use LocalTuya than Zigbee. You get local control with back up.

Is it though? You’re just using another protocol. If your wifi fails you are back to square 1.

Godt poeng og bra kallenavn. Well that true, but with Zigbee I have to have HA running and it seems like a WIFI router is way more robust than a HA instance.

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The robustness depends on you and your choice of hardware. I’ve had more downtime at home when my router failed than anything else.

Are you already sitting on Tuya-devices? If not, take a look at these from our local electronics store (the three I’ve snipped for you, link below the picture). With these you connect your regular dimmable bulbs and a switch (you can use most switches). You can also bind them so that that they don’t need to be physically connected to a switch but use a zigbee switch instead.

When my Dell goes down my backup HA on my Synology NAS will take it over. Not everything… But we can turn on the lights with the ESP wall switches and some other things.

That would be nice but electricians are expensive :frowning:

Might not be exactly what you’re looking for, but a UPS could provide power to a Raspberry Pi for some time since they only draw 5-8 watts depending on the model you have if the power ever went down.

Or you could migrate everything to an old laptop that effectively has a UPS built in via its built-in battery. The laptop would also allow you to go into the bios and turn on the setting where the computer automatically boots itself back up as soon as power is restored.

Yeah, it can be pricy to have it installed, but if you have many bulbs it makes sense. I run 28 bulbs off my 5 dimmers, If you compare it to smart bulbs like Hue it’s not too bad.

Seems to me that if you have so much invested in HA and smart devices then you should have some sort of backup. As suggested, old laptops are an easy solution. My master system is an rpi but I run a copy of this on a laptop. The laptop is also a test environment for any changes.

Is there not a possibility to connect endpoints between the zigbee devices so a button gets direct connected to a lamp?
I am not fully in to zigbee but i think you can do that.
I have mostly used zwave where you have emergency channels so if the router gets disconnected there is a pre defined fallback between units

Is there not a possibility to connect endpoints between the zigbee devices so a button gets direct connected to a lamp?

Yes, you can do that.