Power outage issue

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1

So last night we lost power for a few minutes... When I got things back up and running suddenly my integrations didnt seem to work.
FOr instance, I cant shut off a set of hue lights (any of them) with the dashboard, or from the the hub page in general.
I can do all of that from the hue app though.
Yes I have rebooted the hub :slight_smile:

Looks like most other devices work... ANyone experienced this?
thank you

2

Try going to Settings > Hub Details and checking the time that is displayed. If it’s off hit ‘get time from browser’. Then reboot the hub one more time (using the settings on the hub, don’t cut power to the hub again). Sometimes this is what I have to do after a power outage issue.

3

During a power outage, many devices will end up with different TCP/IP addresses. This can create some confusion for LAN connected devices, like the Hubitat Elevation Hub and your Philips Hue bridge. Zigbee and Z-Wave devices do not have this issue (they do have their own set of issues, though! :wink: )

Most routers have an option to create a DHCP IP Address reservation that is bound to the MAC address of each specific device. So, it is considered a best practice to create a DHCP Reservation for your Hubitat Elevation Hub, Philips Hue bridge, and any other LAN connected devices (for example, a Lutron Caseta SmartBridge Pro.) This will ensure that after a power blip, all of these devices have the same IP address and can begin immediately communicating with one another again.

It is also a very good idea to plug these devices into a small home UPS (uninterruptible power supply) to allow these devices to ride through a power blip. I have my cable modem, router, Hubitat hubs, Lutron SmartBridge, network switch, and a Raspberry Pi all plugged into one UPS.

The Hubitat Elevation hub is a small computer, running everything locally. Thus, it is somewhat susceptible to power blips causing database corruption issues if the hub happened to be writing a record to the database when the power blips. Hubitat creates an automatic backup of your configuration, including the database contents, every morning at about 2-3am. It can restore these backups in the event that a power blip, or other event, results in a corrupted database.

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4

I do almost exactly the same thing (Odroid XU4 instead of RPi), and possibly have a useful addition.

If your RPi is configured to detect when the UPS is running low on juice, you can run a script to shutdown the Hubitat. I think that is way safer than a sudden power off.

Here's the script that I use:

#!/bin/bash
#
he_login=your_hubitat_hub_login
he_passwd=your_hubitat_hub_password
he_ipaddr=your_hubitat_hub_ip_address
cookiefile=`/bin/mktemp`
#
curl -k -c $cookiefile -d username=$he_login -d password=$he_passwd https://$he_ipaddr/login
curl -k -sb $cookiefile -X POST https://$he_ipaddr/hub/shutdown
rm $cookiefile

This script is modified from a script posted by @zarthan for nightly backups.

There's a whole bunch of things that can be done using http POST: backup, reboot, shutdown, zwave network rediscovery (this one's actually an http GET). Comes in handy.

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5

I think I should use yours. Thanks

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6

You have more than one Hubitat hub? What advantages do multiple hubitat hubs get you?

7

I have Production and Development hubs. My family grew weary very quickly of me breaking home automations during the development cycle. :wink:

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8

There are two other common reasons that people have multiple hubs:

  1. ZIgbee bulbs that work as repeaters are terrible repeaters for zigbee end devices like sensors. However, they work well as repeaters for other zigbee bulbs. So some people keep a separate Hubitat for their zigbee bulbs that repeat (eg. Osram, Cree, Hue, GE Link, EcoSmart).

  2. Xiaomi Mijia/Aqara sensors are extremely picky about the zigbee repeaters they work with, and drop off the network easily (and randomly) if the zigbee network has xiaomi-incompatible repeaters. So some people keep a separate Hubitat with just Xiaomi devices and Xiaomi compatible repeaters. I fall in this category .....

9

Only problem is: There aren't that many Hubitats to go around these days. :frowning: