Smart bulbs are one of the most common entries into the world of smart home devices, but they’re not without their problems. If your internet goes down, you may find that you lose features or simply can’t control your bulbs at all. There are several ways to stop this from happening.
Use Matter devices with local control
Alexa doesn’t always need the cloud
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Popular smart home ecosystems such as Alexa and Google Home have made many smart homes heavily reliant on the cloud. With a Works with Google Home light bulb, for example, when you ask your smart speaker to turn on the light, the spoken command is sent from your speaker to Google’s cloud, which interprets the command and sends a message to the smart bulb manufacturer’s cloud, which sends the appropriate command to the bulb to turn on. If the internet goes down, the whole thing falls apart.
Matter changes this, because commands are designed to travel locally over Wi-Fi or Thread. Google states that when you’re at home, commands to Matter devices are carried out locally without an internet connection.
The same is true of Alexa. Alexa can communicate with Matter devices locally, allowing supported Alexa-enabled devices to control them even when the internet is down. With supported Echo devices, Alexa voice commands can also continue to work during an internet outage.
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Move lighting automations to Home Assistant
Run your smart home completely locally
If you want to keep your entire smart home running even when the internet is down, you’ll need to move away from systems like Alexa and Google Home, which rely on cloud services for manyfeatures. There is an alternative that can be set up to work completely locally.
Home Assistant is free and open-source smart home software that you run on your own hardware. You can run it on anything from a Raspberry Pi or old laptop to a mini PC or NAS. Home Assistant is designed with local control and privacy as the focus.
The beauty of Home Assistant is that it doesn’t care what ecosystem your smart home products are designed to work with. You can add Alexa-compatible devices, Apple Home devices, and Google devices, and control them all just the same. You can even set up a local voice assistant that allows you to control your smart home with your voice, without the need for an internet connection.
Switch from Wi-Fi to Zigbee bulbs
Your lights don’t need an internet connection
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Just because you’re using Home Assistant, it doesn’t automatically make your smart home entirely local. If you’re using Wi-Fi smart bulbs that are controlled by a cloud service, then your smart home is still not fully local. Commands from Home Assistant still need to reach the cloud to control your lights.
You can make your lighting fully local by using Zigbee smart bulbs so your bulbs can talk directly to your smart home over your local Zigbee network without needing to use the cloud. Even proprietary systems such as Philips Hue can be controlled locally by Home Assistant using Local Push. Some optional Hue features still rely on the cloud, but all the core features can work locally.
You can also cut Philips Hue out of the loop completely and connect your Philips Hue bulbs directly to Home Assistant using an option such as Zigbee2MQTT. With a suitable Zigbee coordinator, Home Assistant can then control your smart bulbs directly, without the need for a Hue Bridge.
Another benefit of Zigbee is that even if your router goes down, Home Assistant can continue to talk to your smart bulbs over the Zigbee network. Automations that control your lights can continue to run as long as they’re not reliant on your local Wi-Fi network.
Add Zigbee binding
Keep your lights working even when your smart hub is unreachable
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Even though Zigbee smart bulbs can be controlled from Home Assistant without an internet connection or even a local Wi-Fi network, they still need something to send them commands. If your Home Assistant server is out of action, you won’t be able to control your bulbs from your phone, from dashboards, or using smart buttons that send commands via Home Assistant.
That’s where Zigbee binding can help. It’s possible to bind a Zigbee controller such as a remote or smart button directly to a specific Zigbee bulb. With the binding in place, the command is sent directly from the controller to the bulb over your Zigbee network, without needing to go through a smart home hub or Zigbee coordinator at all.
With supported devices, even if your smart home hub has shut down or your Zigbee coordinator has come unplugged, the Zigbee button can talk directly to the Zigbee bulb and turn your lights on and off.
Use smart switches with local control
Dumb bulbs don’t care if the internet is down
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With smart bulbs, the hardware required to communicate with other devices is inside the bulb itself. You can take this out of the bulbs’ hands by installing smart switches and using them with standard dumb bulbs.
Smart switches solve many of the problems with smart bulbs, including the fact that if you turn off the power to a smart bulb at the switch, you can’t control it at all. With a smart switch, you can manually turn the power on and off at the switch while still controlling the switch itself through your smart home.
If your internet goes down, or your smart home server stops working, you can continue to use a smart switch manually, although you may lose remote control. It’s one of the best options for setting up lighting that continues to work how the rest of your household would expect.
Your lights don’t have to rely on the internet
Cloud-based smart devices are very convenient, but convenience comes at a price. Not only can these devices stop working properly when the internet goes down, but smart home companies can even stop supporting cloud-based smart home devices altogether. That’s why a fully local smart home can often be the better choice.