Helpful Tip - Turn Your Internet Off Before Thor Does.... Also Follow Your Own Advice

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Very occasionally a storm will cause my Internet to stop working. Which is mostly annoying for all the expected reasons in such a connected world, but also a timely reminder of the (lack of) reliance some "local" services / hubs have on the Internet being available (not HE, of course). For those who can suffer similar infrequent interruptions it is a good test of the resilience of your setup to turn your Internet off occasionally. Admittedly there are some platforms where it will be a case of just being aware of the impacts rather than solving the issue.... Harmony and Hue in my case.... It is also a good test of your willingness to follow your own advice.... If you have encouraged others to do the same :slight_smile:

It also gives you a chance to curse and swear at your phone manufacturer for deciding to flick between Wifi networks and not connecting to Wi-Fi just because they don't have Internet available.... But maybe that's just me....

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Good discussion start. Of course, it is also a matter of your system design to assure high reliability of critical components. There are multiple single points of failure within our setups, so when selecting components / control methods you need to determine their criticality to safety and what approach to take to reduce reliability issues. Our biggest weakness is power and WAN / LAN availability. Some suggestions:

Surge protection and battery backup for your WAN Access Point, LAN Router, and Hubitat Environment. Fry or loose power to Hubitat CE and all Hubitat functions are lost. Fry the LAN Router and you loose warnings and Hubitat UI control of anything.

If you loose WAN access, you loose warning and UI control for cloud-based device plus any WAN-based security interconnections. I use redundant WAN access capability (i.e., a backup to your primary provider) for prolonged outages. I use my Routers usb port and phones 5G+ / usb tether capability. (That does not mean that Cell will not also be out in a wide-area failure or increased utilization may reduce bandwidth significantly.)

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