Failover/high availability for zigbee devices

Questions & Help
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1

I know Homey Pro is pretty reliable however, since many of my lights are dependent on its zigbee I feel exposed because if my Homey fails I would be without an easy method of managing my lights until I could replace it which could be days.

I wonder if anyone has come up with a reasonable solution which would enable me to have a warm standby should my Homey ever fail.

Currently I run another zigbee hub (not Homey) alongside of Homey and I try to split the lights in each room across the two hubs such that if one hub fails then we could still have partial lighting.

This may be the only way of addressing this problem but I would be really interested in other people’s solutions.

Thanks in anticipation.

2

If your Homey fails, all you can do is get another Homey and restore the backup of the failed Homey (and hope that the failure is due to hardware and not software). Or indeed do as you’re already doing, and let another controller handle (some of) your devices.

With other Zigbee implementations, it’s also possible to bind/group devices together, so you can bind remotes to lights/groups so they can be controlled directly, without a controller as intermediary (alas, it seems that Athom only found out about this sort of functionality recently so it’s not possible to configure this with Homey).

3

Thanks Robert. That’s what I thought.

I will follow up on the remote idea though.

4

If your ZigBee lamps are still connected to dumb switches, then you can also switch the lamps on and off via this, which you should not actually do when you want to switch them via Homey.

My main lighting (dumb lamps) are switched by smart relays. If Homey ever fails, these lamps can still be controlled manually. Only for ambient lighting I use smart ZigBee lamps without any hardware switches.
I know that is not an answer to your question and does not help you currently. But this should only be a tip how you can continue to operate the light even if Homey fails.

5

Thanks Fantross

Whilst you didn’t answer my question exactly it did make me think of another option. I could replace a couple of my zigbee bulbs in each room with WiFi bulbs. These could be controlled by Homey or Smartthings or even Alexa.