Hey  @Blues_man,

The Tapo L535E is still a Wi-Fi smart bulb, it just has added support for the Matter Protocol. This local connection for Matter allows your devices to communicate with a hub when there is no active internet connection, but a connection to your phone is still required through your network. This protocol will, however, allow your devices to get back online very quickly when the network reappears, even if it comes back with no internet. 

If you are looking for something that will work without a Wi-Fi connection entirely, you would need to look for a bulb that does not use Wi-Fi for its communication method - whether this be via Bluetooth, Zigbee, or Zwave. If you only have no internet, you should be able to control the bulb from your Tapo App as long as your phone is connected to the same wireless network as the bulb.

  @Blues_man,

First, Bluetooth Connections on Smart Devices are almost always used for setup and provisioning, not for controlling the device. BT connections are very power hungry and have a few caveats on the networking side that prevent them from being used as a control method.

But, I think you may be confusing your internet and your Wi-Fi. 

When your internet goes out, your Wi-Fi will still work fine, it is only that communications and data will not be able to leave your home through your ISP connection. Your Local Network is made up of all the devices connected to your Wi-Fi and wired to your routers. Because your Wi-Fi would still be running, your phone and smart devices can still have commands sent to them from devices within your network.

When your Wi-Fi is running, and you have no internet, you can control the light from the Tapo app while connected to the same network as the bulb. In fact, whenever you are connected to the same network, your phone will prefer to send commands directly to the bulb, rather than trying to send commands from our cloud servers.

Otherwise, you will want to make use of the device's Matter compatibility and add the device to a hub on your network, which will then act as the 'server' to communicate with the device. This hub will still be communicating with the bulb over your Wi-Fi connection, it is only that an internet connection is not required since the matter controller can control the devices itself.

  @Blues_man,

Hmm, normally, your internet is separate from your network for this very reason. There are a lot of people who have media servers on their network which is completely independent of an internet connection. What brand of router are you connecting to? 

Do you happen to know if your internet from your ISP does in fact go out, and that your network is not rebooting as a result of a schedule or a conistent error?

  @Blues_man,

Apologies, it has been more than hectic around here recently..

It is possible that your Wi-Fi goes down with your network since your router is also the modem from your ISP - but I would highly recommend you quickly contact them to confirm if this is the case or if there is a setting that can be changed. From a few threads I looked at, it looks like the network still is live, just with no internet - but it could be different for your modem.

For your bulbs changing, you likely have them set to Auto-Compensate, which is one of their presets and will automatically change their temperature based on the time of day. I would also make sure, if your internet is out, that you also disable your phone's cellular connection if you want to communicate via Wi-Fi. Most phones will automatically disconnect from networks with no internet and default to its cellular connection.

This is definitely one of the cases where you can upgrade your network to have a separate router or mesh configuration and use a cheaper old-fashioned modem without a router or Wi-Fi built in. This is our mid-range router and is one of our more popular if you want to take a look (Archer AX55), or you could do a simple mesh (Deco X60). Either way it would end up as (Modem > Router > Devices) with just an added ethernet cable connecting your modem to your router.