I’m so suspicious of cloud services that I avoided the entire smart home building until the Matter standard finally gave me an on-premises option. Still, in the process of living with just a local hub, I ran into some issues that you don’t run into when your smart home platform is in the cloud.
It all comes down to a series of numbers
Your phone can’t connect to a hub it can’t find
I have two separate local centers in my house. me first Purchased Home Assistant Green as an easy way to experience Home Assistant without having to spend time choosing hardware and installing software myself. I have been posted ever since Pro Mini like home and Homey Pro for viewing, and I did settled on Homey as my smart home platform of choiceat least for now. Unfortunately, both Home Assistant and Homey suffer from the same problem.
You see, I usually connect to my smart home hubs via Ethernet. This ensures a stable connection and there are fewer things competing for bandwidth in a home all my wall switches are connected over wifi. But Wi-Fi devices have an advantage that is particularly relevant to the smart home: you can easily move them without losing network connection. This is an advantage that the Homey Pro can take advantage of, but the Homey Assistant Green and Homey Pro mini do not have built-in Wi-Fi.
Unfortunately, I’ve had to move my smart home hubs a lot lately. There was a time when I placed my single hub in our network rack next to our cable modem. I have since had to replace the hub with another one and need accessible hubs for photos. This is the life of a product reviewer. During this time, I alternated between connecting the hubs to an Ethernet port near our living room TV stand and to a port near my home office desk. Every time you move a hub, their companion smartphone apps crash.
- Dimensions (external)
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4.41″L x 4.41″W x 1.26″H
- Weight
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12 oz
Home Assistant Green is directly the pre-built hub of the Home Assistant team. It’s a plug-and-play solution that comes with everything you need to set up Home Assistant in your home without installing the software yourself.
Applications lose contact with the hub every time they move
How to solve a problem is not always intuitive
Every time I move Home Assistant Green, I can expect to see an error message the next time I open the assistant. As for the application, no Home Assistant servers were found. This is because it checks for a specific IP address and that address no longer points to anything. Routers now regularly assign a new IP address to devices when they reconnect. This is known as a dynamic IP address that is temporary and subject to change.
I have two options to fix the error message. I can go into my router settings and pull up a list of connected devices. When Home Assistant sees my server, I can manually enter the address into the Android app. At this point, the Matter devices in my home appear normally again.
This is trivial for tech-savvy techies familiar with home networking, but given that many routers still have default passwords, it’s unrealistic to expect this to be something most people know how to do. This complexity limits how many people I can comfortably recommend Home Assistant to without volunteering to be on-call tech support.
An alternative approach is for the companion application to search for the hub automatically. Unfortunately, Home Assistant won’t do this unless I go into the app’s settings for the first time and tell it to forget the previous server address. It’s hardly an intuitive process, and I wouldn’t want to guide my parents over the phone.
Homey’s approach is less sophisticated, but manages to be just as frustrating. The app asks me to select which Homey device I want to connect to, but nothing happens after I select. I open and close the app a few times until I finally get to the new screen.
Finally, here is the solution Use static IP addresses on your smart home hub and the same devices. Again, it’s almost a non-technical choice.
Power outages present their own set of headaches
Losing power is one thing, getting it back is another
I don’t know what to expect when I come back after the power outage. Sometimes I can quickly access my smart home app. Other times I see the IP address change.
I can expect some of my devices to appear offline when I can log in again. If this is a problem with IP addresses as well, it’s not something I can solve in the same way. The simplest option is the painful one: remove the Matter device, put it in pairing mode and add it again. It’s so exhausting that I’d rather wait for everything. Most devices eventually appear online, but the wait is sometimes measured in days rather than minutes or even hours. At least once, the light came on in one of mine Tapo S505 light switches it turns red, meaning I have no choice but to re-pair the device.
With a cloud-based smart home hub, a power outage affects all client devices spread across your home, but the remote server remains unaffected. With local smart home hubs, the server and clients are in the dark together and can be confusing when rebooting.
On a daily basis, these issues are minor. I can go for months without a problem. Unfortunately, this doesn’t matter as much when you decide to move the hub after six months of use and can’t figure out how to get it online.
I believe local hubs are the ideal solution for managing smart devices because they provide us with all the privacy we expect. Unfortunately, they’re still not as powerful as cloud-based options, as home owners may encounter more.
