Hurricane Season and Your Smart Home: What to Do Before, During, and After

Every June, the same question arrives in our inbox in slightly different words: "What do I need to do with the system before a storm?" The short answer is less than you think, provided the system was designed for South Florida in the first place. The longer answer is below, organized the way the season actually unfolds.

Before the season: the things that should already be true

A home automation system in Miami should assume that power will fail, that it will come back dirty, and that the internet may be out for days. If yours was designed by us, the following are already in place. If it was not, they are worth checking.

Surge protection at the rack, not just at the outlet. The equipment rack should sit behind a proper surge-protection and power-conditioning unit. Lightning and grid restoration are the two most common ways we see a Crestron processor or a McIntosh amplifier damaged, and both are preventable. A power strip from the hardware store is not surge protection.

A UPS on the core. The network switches, the control processor, and the cameras should be on an uninterruptible power supply. Not to run through a storm; a UPS is not a generator. Its job is to ride through the flickers and short outages that precede and follow a storm without the system crashing and restarting each time.

Documented shutdown and startup. Your system should have a written procedure, and we keep one on file for every home we supervise. It should tell you, or whoever is in the house, which switches to flip in what order, and how to bring the system back cleanly.

Cloud backups of the programming. A Crestron program and a Lutron lighting database are the intelligence of the house. If a piece of hardware is lost to a surge, the program is what allows the replacement to be running the same evening instead of the following week. We back up the configuration for every supervised system.

When a storm is forecast

With 48 to 72 hours of warning, there are only a few things to do, and most of them are about the house, not the electronics.

1. Lower the shades and lock them. Motorized Lutron shades are not storm shutters, but interior shades lowered fully protect furnishings from the glare and heat of a house with the air conditioning off. If the shades are exterior, retract them entirely; they are not built for hurricane wind.

2. Set the house to Away. A properly programmed Away scene turns off non-essential circuits, sets the thermostat to a holding temperature, and puts the lighting on a minimal security schedule. Do this from the Crestron app before you leave.

3. Do not power down the rack unless we tell you to. This surprises people. A well-protected rack on a UPS is safer left running than powered off by hand, because the surge and conditioning equipment stays active. If a direct hit is forecast and evacuation is ordered, we will contact supervised clients with specific instructions.

4. Photograph the rack. Two minutes. If anything is damaged, a before picture makes the insurance conversation shorter.

During the storm

If you are home, leave the system alone. Repeated power flickers are the moment when a UPS does its work; a system that is being manually restarted during those flickers is the one that ends up with a corrupted processor. If the internet goes down, the local control keeps working: the keypads still control the lights, the shades still respond. The app will reconnect when the internet does.

Cameras on a UPS will continue recording locally through an outage. This is often the footage a client wants afterward.

After the storm: the part people skip

Power comes back. The system reboots. Most things work. This is where a supervised home and an unsupervised one part ways.

Utility power after a storm is unstable for hours, sometimes days, with voltage swings and brief re-outages as the grid is rebuilt. Equipment that survived the storm is frequently damaged in this window. Keep the rack on its protection and let the UPS absorb it.

Once the power is stable, three checks:

• Network first. Confirm the switches and access points are up. If the network is not stable, nothing that depends on it will be.

• Processor and lighting. Confirm the Crestron processor has reconnected to the Lutron system and that a scene fires correctly. If schedules have drifted, the processor will resync its clock when the internet returns.

• Audio and cinema. Turn on one zone and one source. Amplifiers, particularly high-current designs, are the equipment most sensitive to a bad power event. If a McIntosh amp will not come out of standby, do not keep trying; call us.

For supervised clients, we do most of this remotely. Our monitoring tells us when a processor has gone offline and when it has come back, and we run a post-storm health check on every supervised system before most clients have thought to ask.

The honest summary

A hurricane is a stress test for the decisions made when the system was installed. Surge protection, a UPS, a clean network, and documented programming are not hurricane features; they are simply good design, and a storm is when you find out whether you have them. If you are not sure whether your home has them, that is a conversation worth having in the spring, not in September.

CasaHiFi supervises networks and control systems for clients across Miami-Dade, Broward, and the Keys, with pre- and post-storm checks included in our service plans.