If the internet connection is lost

Can the Hub manage a situation where the internet connection is lost and regained often (almost every day)? This is the situation in my holiday house.

Best,
Peter

It depends on what you mean by “manage”

While the Internet is off-line a few things will run, not too many. Notifications will stack up and then be sent all at once when in and it does come back on, which can be quite confusing.

It’s supposed to be that when the hub comes back everything goes back to running. However, many members report that after An outage, scheduled events remain scheduled for the past and therefore do not run. This requires opening the SmartThings mobile app, looking at each scheduled event, and saving it again. How much that affects you depends on how many scheduled events you have. But at least that step can be done remotely.

In other cases, some devices either drop off the network or to get stuck in a specific reporting mode, like a motion detector that is constantly reporting motion. Those fixesvrequire resetting the individual device, usually by removing the batteries and putting them back in again.

SmartThings staff has posted that engineering is looking at these issues, and presumably some improvement can be expected in the future, but there’s no specific timeline for fixes.

So it’s hard to say how much your vacation home would be affected. It really depends on the exact automations you have set up to run. It might be that Everything that would work very well for you, or it might be unacceptable.

My biggest concern in your specific case is that many of the current fixes require taking the batteries out of battery-operated devices and putting them back in again to resync everything. That’s obviously not going to be possible if you’re not physically at the home.

So I would say that it’s intended to be able to handle that kind of situation, but at the present time you have to evaluate exactly how you using it because it’s not hitting the mark completely right now.

Would those issues (devices losing access to the hub) happen if it was just the internet down though? I’m assuming that the hub would still remain powered on (maybe this isn’t accurate, but the OP said Internet down, not power down).

Scheduling issues would still crop up but if power was maintained, shouldn’t the devices maintain connection to the hub?

Thanks for the replies. I do not expect outages. Only problems with the internet connection.

It all depends. But if the problem is due to synchronization between the cloud account and the local hub, they will occur when the Internet goes out even though power is maintained. Which does seem to be what people are seeing. That is, the problems begin after the Internet connection is restored. Even if the devices ran locally OK while the Internet connection was out.

For example, people have been reporting the problems after platform updates, which don’t affect local power at all. So my expectation would be that the original poster will see the same problems.

The problem I have been having and it occurs like clockwork is that the Smartthings device, is that ANY time the internet goes out (even if just for a second), the Smartthings hub goes offline.

The ONLY way that I can get it working again is to unplug it and then plug it back in. I had to take out the batteries to do this. I literally have to do this almost daily.

Is this a known issue? Is there anything I can do to stop it? I can’t really help my internet going out. I would expect the device to recover when it is back up like every other web enabled device does. This has lead to us having some severe dependability issues with this platform.

Known issue, but it only affects some people. See the following discussion thread.

Thank you! I just had a nice long read of that thread. Glad to see I am not alone (not that there is a fix).

Thanks!

1 Like

I just posted a workaround on the thread above that fixes the issue for my UVerse setup.

My issue is when the internet drops, nothing happens, but when internet restores, my garden irrigation goes off by itself!!! It doesn’t effect my 30 other modules, door sensors, motion sensors, lights, JUST my garden irrigation that is controlled by a Fibaro relay. I also get 12 push notifications that it has gone off, and lots of text notifications.

If anyone can tell me why this is, and how I can stop it I’d like to know, because so far I’ve been in the house when it’s happened, but I’m worried I’ll be away and my garden well flood!

Do you lose power as well as Internet, or just the Internet connection?

It’s just the internet connection drops sometimes, the power is fine.
It happened again today, I looked at my phone, to see the only Z-wave module that triggered was the Fibaro relay controlling the irrigation.
Why does the internet dropping cause the SmartThings v2 hub to send a command to the relay to send power to the water valve and open it. It’s a regular 24vac valve. VERY very strange.

That is strange indeed. Hopefully someone who has seen similar behavior before will respond.

What device handler are you using for the Fibaro?

Also, if you feel like digging into the logs, there might be something helpful there: