I guess it depends on your area and what you wish to deal with. We are lucky here we have very few power outages. Almost all of them are in the sub minute range with a few going to 5 minutes. I figure I will never have to worry about these and don't mind dealing with recycling the hub power to restart it when the outage lasts longer.
When we have a longer power outage I unplug most everything I can (or shut off breakers). I prefer to let others deal with whatever transients occur when the power returns.
Mine's still in the drawer after coming in from the US courtesy of a friend. The best part is that it has both 5 and 12V outputs.
True - You can use it for quite a few devices at once! I currently have 3 of my Hubs on it, had to get a 12V to 5V converter for this to work, as there are only 2 5V ports, but it worked out!
It is rather expensive though…. Having other solutions available is great!
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Reading through the different posts it seems there are two separate goals for a HUB UPS.
- Simply protect the database from sudden power off corruption. This is my goal.
- Continue operating for an extended period of time, hopefully through the whole length of the power outage.
For me a single 18650 cell is perfect. Early in my research I have considered using 4 AA or AAA lithium non chargeable batteries. Just to bridge the gap between power loss and shutdown.
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I need an ups.with normal outlet for.mine so i can out a zwave or wifi switch between and reboot remotely if.need be .
I wouldn't say those options are not mutually exclusive. I first and foremost I want to prevent any power blip to the hub. This is to prevent power off coruption.
Then I also want to let it run for as long as possible to prevent total loss of automation if i am away and can not manually cycle power to activate the hub afterwards. I think once you know the expected max runtime you then would want to put in a graceful shutdown before that occurs. With two 18650's hopefully that is a fairly long time. I think my point is this isn't as simple as just shutdown after a slightly longer then expected blip especially if you are not present to cycle the power to the device.
On a computer with lest say APC's powerchute software that means i would set it to run until maybe 5 min of battery was left. Then I would also have it set to power the pc back on after mains power was restored. My unraid server does just that. But we dont have that extra logic in most cheap ups devices. We just get hopefully good battery power until it runs out.
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i have a rule on my ups to shutdown the hub when the battery power goes below a certain runtime or percentage.. so as to not cold turn off the hub.. as you said when the ups comes back on the hub will too and also the kasa wifi switch.
probably too expensive to build a network interface or even telnet over usb to these cheap devices to monitor when they are ab out to run out of runtime. but it seems necessary if you have a long power outage.. I have had databse corruption in a hub due to cold turn off previously.
but if ou can somehow build is some sort of telnet interface over serial usb a driver could be written to monitor it.
I have that in my little synacsess PDU. @thebearmay was kind enough to write me an integration for it. Works fantastically.
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I'm using this SonOff on my two hubs, connected via wi-fi. Requires a couple of adapters, but once connected up, it works great.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B083BKBKW5/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1
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That is fantastic. With that once power is restored one could restart a hub after a graceful shutdown. Nice find
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How do you use that to bring the hub back online when it’s offline?
Just to clear, I'm using it to restart the hub after it's been shut down via the shutdown command on the hub.
When I want to restart the hub I just turn the sonoff switch off and then on again from the sonoff app, and then the hub starts up.
ah ok, I thought you'd found some clever way to automate it.
Well, I think I'm pretty clever...
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PCB’s and solder stencil just arrived, however, I’m still waiting for a couple of parts from mouser.
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If there is ever a V2 with a changed board, perhaps the addition of "restart circuitry" might be considered.
I've considered an number of circuit options but have never had the need for this level of automation.
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I'll see how we go with v1, however I have ordered a couple of zigbee modules to play with. If I can get my head around the GPIO functions and how to integrate them with the current design I'll prototype a v2 - I'm quite overloaded atm with projects, so I need to get v1 to ppl first.
I need to pop down to Jaycar and grab some 18650 LFP batteries to test the units with, but I doubled checked and I do now have all the parts. So I'll start v1 production this weekend.
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Woot! Solder baby, solder!
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If I get time during the week, I'll put together a Panel (6) of units and test them out to make sure everything is working as expected.
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I assume you're using the ewelink app to control it?
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