It worked. Local automations fire faster, no question, and during an outage last month the mudroom kept working exactly like it should while half my other smart devices sat there useless. That part I’d defend to anyone.
What I didn’t fully think through: the camera side. G5 Pro and G100 cloud recording still needs the cloud, obviously, so I’ve got this split setup now where my locks and lights are proudly local and my actual security footage is completely dependent on the same connection I was trying to route around. Feels like I solved half a problem and called it done.
I keep seeing people on this forum treat “local automation” as an unambiguous win, more private, more reliable, no argument. I’m less sure now. The privacy angle holds up. The reliability angle only holds up for the parts of your setup that don’t need the cloud anyway, which for most people includes the cameras, which is the part most people actually care about protecting.
Curious if anyone’s found a real way to close that gap, local motion detection with a fallback that doesn’t depend on cloud connectivity for the recording itself, or if we’re all just accepting that cameras are the one category that’s stuck depending on someone else’s server no matter what.
