After one month with my hubitat

Why Hubitat Elevation
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I am beyond impressed with the hardware, software and support!!

The first couple of weeks were not the easiest. I had a few battles trying to understand how the ZigBee and Z-wave were different from the ST hub. I also had some adjustments to make to RM after spending so much time getting use to WebCoRE.

Now that everything has settled down, I couldn't be happier. Not only do things just run, they do so faster and regardless of my Internet. I have 72 devices (13 are virtual) and 27 rules running them.

The Alexa and Lutron integration just work. There wasn't any thinking to be done. No added skills on the Amazon side for Alexa. No resetting all of my Caseta dimmers and switches to add them to Hubitat. Just a few clicks and a little info and they just worked. An added bonus was in being able to access my Lutron from both the Hubitat and ST at the same time. That made the transition almost seamless.

Being based on Groovy makes the the ability to add the device drivers from ST really great! It's not the most painless of processes and sometimes there is a bit of work to be done, but that was also the case with ST.

The support from both the community and the company has been spot on. There are a few things which will take time to sort out and the updates are coming at a reasonable pace. The fixes are targeted at making things work better rather than adding on bells and whistles which is really great!

When I bought it (I was number #17) I had the mindset that if it didn't work, the money lost wasn't bad. I am beyond surprised to say that this was the best home automation purchase I have made hands down. For the price it delivers HUGE and this is just at the 1.0 release. I am genuinely excited to see how this product and support mature over time.

This is a great product and I appreciate those who continue to put so much time into it. It has made my travels along the home automation path a lot easier.

28 Likes
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I feel about the same (number 26 here)! I was not keen on buying a new HA hub/system when I had spent so much time trying to migrate off SmartThings to Home Assistant (HASS), but I found HASS a bit limited in that it didn’t support nearly as many ZigBee devices and even Z-Wave devices could be a bit awkward if its Z-Wave database didn’t “know” about them. Now, however, I’ve got almost all my devices paired to Hubitat instead and many integrated via MQTT into HASS, where I still have most of my logic (I moved almost everything HASS supported off of ST to HASS, but now I’ve moved everything off of HASS to Hubitat and completely got rid of my Z-Wave and ZigBee radios on my HASS machine—incidentially, I was using the same Linear HUSBZB-1 stick the Hubitat hub ships with, but Hubitat clearly wrote much better software for it). I’d love to get rid of HASS entirely, but I spent a lot of time porting my logic from webCoRE and SmartApps to AppDaemon, a Python scripting environment roughly equivalent (if not greater) in power compared to webCoRE. I don’t want to re-write them for a second or third time in the course of a few months, at least not yet, but this way at least everything runs locally (some people use ST with the MQTT Bridge SmartApp to get their devices into HASS, but this has very little advantage from my perspective because it will need to go through the ST cloud for everything then).

I’ve been impressed with the rapid (and user-controllable!) firmware updates so far and look forward to future firmware and other updates that will add the few features I’m missing that keep me using HASS and ST (mobile notifications and more Alexa support, for example) that I assume will come in the futire. I appreciate the bug fixes and minor tweaks they’ve been focusing on lately, however.

If only Hubitat been released a couple months earlier, I could have prevented all the time and effort I spent setting up and configuring, reconfiguring, and testing HASS (which is nice but a lot more work to set up and less user-friendly and, as I said, much less widely compatible with the Z-Wave and particularly ZigBee devices many people coming from ST use).

The price is totally worth it to me—at the introductory price it is/was more or less the same as an ST Hub, and even at the “regular” price it’s comparable to Vera Plus while being, in my opinion, better: Vera (which I tried before deciding that I might as well save money and use HASS if didn’t support many of my devices) is also more limited in device support, and if you’re switching from ST, it’s much easier to adapt to Hubitat.

So…good job, Hubitat team. This is literally exactly what I was looking for: something similar to ST but that ran locally. I thought the systems I tried in the meantime were close, but you hit this one out of the park. :slight_smile:

8 Likes
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Please keep the reviews coming. This is great feedback and what other people need to see so that they know this is a great place to be too. Hardware is well, hard. If we want them to be successful and stay around we need to keep attracting new members to the platform.

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Similar experience to mine. Since you both seem to have alot of rules setup do you mind sharing your favorites?

Mine personally are, setting the locks up to autolock after 5 minutes. I also have a rule that shuts off my fireplace after 60 minutes and my whole house attic fan after 60 minutes. Plan on taking the attic fan further with delta of inside to outside temp and cooling setpoint but right now I am still just getting basics working. I am also using some basic lights ramp up to wake the kids in the morning, and lockdown the house at night.

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I couldn’t be happier with my move from ST to HE. ST, to me, is very limited without Webcore. Now, IMO, the future of ST as I knew it is uncertain. I think Samsung has a different agenda for the platform. We’ll see. Also, even when I had ST working in the technical sense, everyday something would be wacky. Every...single....day. Could be small. The failure of a device to respond, maybe once, maybe a few times, then it starts working again. Maybe something big. An update occurs, all routines fail after that, Phantom lights turning on and off, presence coming and going for no reason. I decided to leave ST months ago when I asked bout the possibility of backup/restore in the future. I’m not exaggerating when I say some people seemed genuinely upset when I mention how crazy it was that if a hub failed I’d have to manually rebuild everything. Webcore was almost as silly to me in the way it handled backing up. I know this is a bit long, but it surprises me how much I put up with the shortcomings in that system. Great concept, wonderful community for ST and Webcore, had some great features, but it was. high-wire act and I didn’t want to wait until I fell off. HE has great support and I think a great future.

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Do you mind on expanding on this statement? I am waiting on my HE to arrive (ordered last night) and am curious.

Thank you!

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I had to add some additional zigbee repeaters when I switched from ST to HE to maintain a stable mesh. The transmission power of Hubitat’s zigbee stick seems to be lower, which other people have described as well. It was easy enough to deal with though.

1 Like