Your smart home going down can be a real pain. There may be automations you rely on daily that suddenly no longer work. If there’s a power outage, your smart home doesn’t have to give up the ghost.
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What fails during a power outage
Once your smart home hub is down, so is your smart home
Credit: Ismar Hrnjicevic / How-To Geek
When you lose power to your home, mains-powered devices will stop working, unless they have their own batteries. When it comes to your smart home, it means that the key things that keep it running suddenly stop working.
Your smart home hub is the brain of your smart home, and once it loses power, your smart home is effectively dead. Whether you’re using a smart speaker, smart display, or smart home software such as Home Assistant running on a computer or server, without power, your hub will shut down and take the rest of your smart home with it.
Your router is also a vital component, allowing your smart home hub to communicate with other devices on your network. Once your router is down, your Wi-Fi and local network control will usually no longer work.
Even if you use devices that use their own networks, such as Zigbee or Z-Wave sensors, once your hub is down, there’s nothing to communicate with these devices, so they become effectively useless.
The UPS setup that gives the best reliability
Keep key hardware running
Credit: EcoFlow
This is where an Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) can save the day. A UPS is essentially a power strip with a built-in battery. When your power is on, the battery charges up and passes power through to any connected devices. When the power goes out, the UPS automatically kicks in and continues to keep powering your connected devices from the internal battery, keeping them running without interruption.
For your smart home, the key devices you should connect to a UPS are your router, your smart home hub, and any vital powered devices such as coordinators and hubs. As long as these key devices are plugged into your UPS, they’ll keep running even if the power goes out.
A UPS can’t run forever. You might be able to get anything from a few minutes to an hour or two of power from it before the battery starts to run out, depending on the UPS capacity and load. Eventually, if the power hasn’t come back on, your UPS will run out of battery and stop powering connected devices.
This is where having a backup source of power can help. A portable generator, for example, can provide power for hours or even days, which should hopefully be enough time for the power to come back. A UPS will cover short outages, and a generator can help for longer ones.
How to choose the right size UPS
Go a little larger than your power draw
If your UPS is just for keeping your smart home up and running, you don’t necessarily need a huge amount of capacity. Typically, the higher the capacity, the more you need to spend on a UPS.
The best bet is to figure out a rough estimate of the power draw of the devices you want to keep running. You can figure out a ballpark figure based on the input power of your devices, which should be significantly higher than the typical power draw, since this is the maximum the device can pull. A more accurate method is to use something like an energy-monitoring smart plug to get some real-world figures, although it’s worth monitoring for a day or two, as the power draw may vary a lot.
Once you know the total power draw of all your devices, you’ll want to add in a little headroom to ensure that your UPS can definitely handle it. Adding 25% to the total power draw should be sufficient. You can then look for a UPS that supports at least that capacity, without buying something that’s complete overkill for your needs.
Make your UPS smart too
Your UPS won’t run forever
Credit: APC
While a UPS can help keep your smart home running, it can also become part of your smart home. Many UPS units have a USB port that you can use to connect to a smart home server. You can then pull live data from the UPS.
This data can be incredibly useful. It can tell you when the UPS is running on battery, which means the power has gone out, it can tell you the current load, it can tell you how long it’s been running, and how much battery is left.
If you don’t have a generator, this last piece of information is very useful. When the battery is getting low, you can shut down your smart home server gracefully, rather than letting it suddenly die when it stops receiving power. This can reduce the risk of database or OS corruption or other errors.
In a well-designed smart home, you should be able to use your home whether the smart part is operational or not. If your power goes out, you may still lose some useful features, however. A UPS can help to keep your smart home on even if your lights aren’t.
