Frustratingly Unreliable

I believe the Smartthings buttons have a known issue where if they remain idle long enough, they need an initial press to wake them up. I have one that doesn’t get used very frequently and rarely works on the first press.

That has not been my experience - we use them every night in our master bedroom and then in the morning. Very similar pattern to the my office (except offset by an hour or so). It's very strange only the office button is behaving this way and it's very repeatable. I'm missing something obvious! Anyway not too worried it's merely an annoyance..

I've seen that with some of them - I replaced one that would do that with an identical button, in the same exact location, and it's never given me a lick of trouble.

If you've got more than one, try swapping them, location-wise.

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My locks are all Zigbee, Yale. They are all within 10 ft of the hub, and they all have repeaters (Nue lights switches and GPOs) near them and close to the hub as well. There are a few Zigbee LED down lights as well, which might be causing the locks issues, in terms of network, but so far with HE I have not found a way to see which network route each device is using.

Most of my network is Zigbee, with the odd zwave device here and there. The Zwaves are all ok so far.

Angus,

I guess what you say has confirmed my point. The HE system is not mature, stable, reliable, and especially not resilient. You have to perform multiple acts of near wizardry to make anything complex do what is expected when expected, reliably. It's not a consumer device to plug and play and be trusted. You have to experiment, test, verify, rework, reconfigure, etc.

The Zigbee radio (at least here in in AU) seems very poor. This seems to be similar elsewhere with people saying you need repeaters as close as 5 ft.

Wow, three hubs required to make it work. Now that's a nightmare in itself. And expensive to boot.

I use just 1 hub myself and nowadays it ticks along quite nicely, including supporting a custom dashboard of some complexity. I'm pretty happy with my set-up and plan many extensions for blinds, more curtains and door locks. I treat it as my hobby and as such it's a lot of fun (and quite annoying often lol). I try to keep it in perspective but I've certainly had many frustrations along the way. Try to enjoy it, as a challenge. There is no other system out there that is any better, and most are a lot worse, trust me.

I've read it's best practice to have a repeater close to the hub so I've done that. It seems to work out fine. They are relatively cheap so for me at least it doesn't really matter to add a few around the property.

The folks at HE have always maintained that you only really need one hub and I think for the most part that is true. Indeed at my residential client's largish (3600sqft) older home I've a single C-7 for the main house and I would say it's been mostly successful current pairing/routing issues aside - I did end up adding a C-5 I had to the detached garage because of signal issues.

For my setup I had been using 2 C-4s by location (one upstairs/one on the main floor) for a year or so and it was working great. With the release of the C-7 and the idea of a more powerful Z-Wave radio decided to migrate all my devices to a different multi-hub configuration - one by radio "type": a C-7 for Z-Wave, a C-5 for Zigbee and (maybe) one of the old C-4's repurposed just for just cloud/network device stuff. So far it appears to be working well - I am having some driver issues but nothing crazy.

Going forward for other clients with larger homes I might go with a multi-hub setup probably by location. Why? Based on experience I feel it's just more reliable - less "stress" on the individual hubs and taking one out temporarily won't kill the whole system. The less issues the less customer support... :grin:

I cannot speak for @TechMedX but In my case I love to tinker in all things tech related and always have. There is a desire to explore and optimize as much as possible. Adding a 2nd or 3rd hub really helps in distributing the load and expanding the mesh area/strength.

Is it really necessary? Maybe not but each use-case is different.

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No it is not requited. I moved to the C7 by choice, so I could access all the new Z-wave features. I left the C4 since I had it, and have 100 sensors I didn't feel like moving (and it had no real benefit to move). Yes the C5 I added for apps because I want to run several "always on" dashboards, Hubigraphs, and other apps that generate a lot of 'work' and I didn't want it bogging down my device hub.

I use Node-Red because it makes more since to me than RM and I can "see" my 'rules' in action. This allows me to make more complex automations easier (personal preference), and another burden taken off the hubs.

Is all this needed? NO. But as Bruce said once the hub is not a super computer, it does not have unlimited resources. You need to keep it simple and work with the hub.

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Not many zwave devices, and what I have are working OK. Most issues for me are on Zigbee or with the HUb or its UI.

2 of my 3 Samsung buttons act this way on my ST hub. I have to press the button once to "wake" it, then it works. It's gotten old so right now I just use them for temp sensors. I just got my HE hub so I'll be starting that migration today.

Oh very cool - well good luck and welcome! I think the buttons work well in HE provided you have a strong mesh which is easier to do with Zigbee it seems.

I found my issue last night - It's a driver thing with the sengled bulbs. I had mine set to "Generic Zigbee RGBW". I set them back to the sengled drivers and this morning it worked. I still think there is something glitchy going on but it looks like a sengled bulb driver issue not a button one.

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Thanks! I'll keep an eye out for that when I get to it. :+1:

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Zigbee has been painless for me. I have about 60 zigbee devices. The only issue I had with Z-Wave was 2.2.4.153. I was using some Iris Z-Wave Repeaters and they were crashing my mesh. I removed the Z-Wave side and it's been smooth ever since. Most of the time I hear about Zigbee issues, it has to do with using Zigbee bulbs that repeat. The other common issue I see is people with a ton of Zigbee devices but not enough repeaters. I use Z-Wave light switches and Zigbee in-wall outlets for a strong mesh for both.

These Z-Wave are all direct connected and some are at opposite ends of the house.


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I forgot about that. They require some extra finesse from the driver. I went back and forth on the drivers before discovering this. Now using the Sengled driver of course.

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It’s always had a high random error %. I’ve always had ( but c4 was better overall) completely random lights that don’t work or events that are missed. I’ve given up being frustrated, being a test bed to supply problem reports or “figure out and report” The response is “it’s probably a weak zwave mesh” yet you can have 3 zigbee devices 5 feet from the hub and a light misses a timed event. Then there is the “certified” which truth be told, upsets me more than any advertising. Let’s face it, I have a 25 year old USB device that still works fine in a new windows computer. So it’s pretty frustrating to try and comprehend that newer hubs aren’t 100% fully backward compatible with older devices. But “certified” is a word like “unlimited” and many others that no longer have any real world meaning.
Meh, is what it is, i wouldn’t use HA beyond novelty convenience anyway so if something fails I just throw the wall switch and move on with my life. Life is too short to “save time” spending hours a week to not have to spend .01 seconds passing a switch and flicking it. Sure it’s a nice idea, maybe in another 40 years HA will actually be reliable. 40 years ago, I though we would be there but like everything lots of players came onboard providing many things that do the same thing has led to fragmentation not to mention when new companies with the “ newest greatest “ disappear as fast as they came after introducing one really good item in a line of garbage.

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