- Posted on
Wed May 17, 2023 11:37 am
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jltnol
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- Posts: 994
- Joined: Oct 15, 2013
Its complicated.
The first thing is for Indigo to detect a power failure. I can do this in 2 ways: the first is from the Alarm system plugin that notes the alarm system is now on battery mode which is generally the fastest, and the 2nd is from my Synology Server which is connected to a UPS, can detect AC loss, and can send out a text message to Indigo. (and to me). The Indigo UPS plugin is too slow to respond, and won't report back to Indigo fast enough to be of much use.
Like one of the previous posters, I too have a whole house generator, so it's really a matter of getting Indigo to tell everything what to do once the generator kicks in. Its pretty quick to come on, but complicating things are the Hue and Lifx bulbs, all of which have to power on, then check into their hubs in the case of Hue, or get connected to WiFi in the case of the Lifx. That does take some time to complete, so I have to figure that delay into what I want Indigo to do.
(And as a side note, the generator is connected to a Raspberry PI which can notify me of power issues via text message, but I haven't been able to integrate that into Indigo as of yet)
Generally just a DAY restore group and a NIGHT restore group. Complicating this slightly is whether I am at home or not. No need to leave the lights on if no one is home, so that too is part of what Indigo has to manage as well.
And I'll be the first to say it's not fool proof. Lots of weird things can happen in literally the seconds from when the power goes out, when the generator kicks in, and when power is restored. Depending on the timing of all of those events, things CAN go wrong. I'm lucky enough to have a fiber internet connection which seems somewhat immune to power failures, so even if I'm not at home, I can manually mange these events if necessary. But that's generally just an Action Group away from putting things back like they should be.