I was surprised to find after much searching that there is no fan + light control out there for zwave/zigbee similar to the remote controllers you can find at Lowes and Home Depot. So I broke down and wired in a GE dimmer switch for my fan and ran a separate always-hot line up to the fan. In the canopy, I installed an Aeotec Smart Dimmer, shorted the switch to always on, and wired it to the fan light. Worked great. Then I added an Aeon Minimote so that the fan light could be controlled without having to use a smartphone app. Everything was great…
That night, by chance, our internet went out.Imagine my surprise when I could not turn the light on/off! It was stuck on for 2 days until we got the internet connection back up.
After more playing around, I’ve found that the Aeotec Smart Dimmer isn’t in the local processing devices list. Interestingly, it’s listed as “Z-Wave Dimmer Switch Generic”. Is there a different device handler that I could assign this in order to gain local processing? (I have searched but can’t seem to find anything.) It’s more than a little concerning to install this dimmer throughout my house and lose control of all the fan lights if the internet goes down.
Hate to break it to you, but with local processing you’re still going to be mostly unable to control your light when the SmartThings cloud (or your home internet connection) is down. All local processing gets you is your smartlighting automations will continue to work even without being able to connect to the cloud.
If your light was on when your internet went down, you’d still have no way to tell the light to turn off; your mobile app won’t be able to communicate with your light as that will require a hop through the cloud, even if your device is available for local processing.
If you had previously created a smartlighting automation that turns your light off at, say, 11pm every day, and your internet went out at 10pm, a local device would still get the command to turn off at 11pm from your hub directly without requiring cloud connectivity.
Change your DTH to Aeon illuminator module and it will be local if your are using a genetic DTH for your minimote then by using smart lighting smartapps. You should be able to control your light locally. You can check this two site for local device and SmartApps.
That’s a good point. It doesn’t have to be a scheduled smartlighting automation. If you had setup a minimote or other physical button controller that runs locally, then I guess you could still use that even if your hub can’t connect to the internet. @JDRoberts?
The minimote is available locally if you are using the standard device type handler, but it’s still true that the only smart app that can run locally is a smart lighting automation that only includes device type handlers that can also run locally. Which means you still can’t use a minimote to change the mode or arm/disarm smart home monitor or rrun a routine. But you could use it just to turn the micro on and off using smart lighting.
Sure enough, that did the trick! I was already using the smart lighting smartapp assigned to the buttons of the minimote. Switching to the aeon illuminator DTH allowed it to run local. I pulled my internet connection and verified that although the phone app couldn’t communicate, I was able to use the minimote to turn the light and fan on and off. Thank you so much!
