I am suspicious of cloud services, so much so that I avoided the entire premise of a smart home until the Matter standard eventually presented me with a local-only option. Yet in the process of living with a local-only hub, I’ve encountered some issues that you just don’t face when your smart home platform is based in the cloud.
It all comes down to a set of numbers
Your phone can’t connect to a hub that it can’t find
I have two separate local hubs in my home. I first purchased Home Assistant Green as an easy way to experience Home Assistant without having to spend time picking out hardware and installing the software myself. I have since been sent a Homey Pro Mini and Homey Pro for review, and I’ve settled on Homey as my smart home platform of choice, at least for now. Unfortunately, both Home Assistant and Homey suffer from the same issue.
You see, I typically connect to my smart home hubs via Ethernet. This provides a stable connection and that’s one less thing competing for bandwidth in a home where all of my wall switches are connected over Wi-Fi. But there is an advantage Wi-Fi devices have that is particularly relevant to a smart home: you can easily move them without severing the network connection. It’s an advantage the Homey Pro can capitalize on, but Home Assistant Green and the Homey Pro mini both lack built-in Wi-Fi.
Unfortunately, I’ve needed to move my smart home hubs quite often lately. There was a time when I tucked my single hub away in our networking rack alongside our cable modem. I’ve since needed to swap out the hub for another, and I’ve needed hubs accessible for photos. It’s the product reviewer’s life. During this time, I’ve alternated between plugging hubs into an Ethernet port near our living room TV stand and a port near my home office desk. Each time I move a hub, their companion smartphone apps fall apart.
- Dimensions (exterior)
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4.41″L x 4.41″W x 1.26″H
- Weight
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12 Ounces
Home Assistant Green is a pre-built hub directly from 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 needing to install the software yourself.
Apps lose connection to the hub whenever they move
It’s not always intuitive how to fix the problem
Whenever I move my Home Assistant Green, I can expect to see an error message the next time I open the companion app. As far as the app is concerned, there is no Home Assistant server to be found. That’s because it’s checking for a specific IP address and that address no longer points to anything. Routers now regularly provide devices with a new IP address whenever they reconnect. This is known as a dynamic IP address, one that is temporary and expected to change.
To fix the error message, I have two options. I can sign in to my router’s settings and pull up the list of connected devices. When I spot my Home Assistant server, I can manually enter the address into the Android app. At which point the Matter devices in my home reappear like normal.
This is trivial for tech-savvy tech enthusiasts familiar with home networking, but when you consider the fact that too many routers still have their default passwords, it’s unrealistic to expect this to be something most people know how to do. This complexity places a limit on how many people I can comfortably recommend Home Assistant to without also volunteering to be on-call tech support.
An alternative approach is for the companion app to search for the hub automatically. Unfortunately, Home Assistant won’t do so until I first enter the app’s settings and tell it to forget the previous server address. It’s hardly an intuitive process and not one I’d want to guide my parents through over the phone.
Homey’s approach is less complicated but manages to be just as frustrating. The app asks me to select which Homey device I wish to connect to, but after making the selection, nothing happens. I end up opening and closing the app several times until eventually it proceeds to a new screen.
Ultimately, the solution is to use a static IP addresses with your smart home hub and devices alike. Again, hardly an non-technical option.
Power outages introduce their own set of headaches
Losing power is one thing, but regaining it is another
I don’t know what to expect when the power comes back on following an outage. Sometimes, I am able to quickly hop back into my smart home app. Other times, I find the IP address has changed.
When I am able to hop back in, I can expect some of my devices to show up as offline. If this is an issue that is also related to IP addresses, it’s not one I can address in the same way. The most straightforward option is a painful one: to remove the Matter device, place it in pairing mode, and re-add it. This is tedious enough that I prefer to wait things out. Most devices eventually show up online, but the wait is sometimes measured not in minutes or even hours, but days. At least once I’ve had the light on one of my Tapo S505 light switches glow red, meaning I have no choice but to re-pair the device.
With a cloud-based smart home hub, a power outage impacts all the client devices spread throughout your home, but the distant server remains unfazed. With local smart home hubs, the server and clients are in the dark together and liable to be confused when they power back on.
On a day-to-day basis, these issues are minor. I can go months without problems. Yet, sadly, that doesn’t matter much when you decide to move a hub after six months of use and can’t figure out how to get it back online.
I believe local hubs are the ideal solution to controlling smart devices, since they afford us all the privacy we expect. Unfortunately, they are not yet as robust as the cloud-based options homeowners are more likely to encounter.
