Hey Guys I have 50+ switches around the whole house. All of them are GE switches. They work fine with SmartThings I can physically turn it on and off and I see the zwave message going back and forth to SmartThings. All the status is updated immediately (without polling anything to update the status). I join 2 of them to the hubitat hub for test with the intention to start migrating all them latter. As soon I start testing I was able to turn it on and off from the HUB but when I change them in the device itself it never update the status in the HUB. I of course tried many different drivers and tested as much as I could and it never worked. I read many different threads saying old zwave switches doesn't report the status and must work only with poll method but that's never the case when using SmartThings in all of those switches. I'm not using Dashboard to check the status I'm checking it directly in the device. I tried to monitor the Event Logs and ZWave Logs while pressing the switch but nothing get back to the hub. I did the same test in SmartThings and I saw the event reaching right away. Is it a BUG in Hubitat? Incompatibility with GE/Jasco old switches?
I start buying those switches in 2016 some of them have a tag in the back of the switch saying :
Ver: 3.0e.
For now I join them back to SmartThings until I can find a way to start using Hubitat hub.
My Hub is:
You need to look at the device details and verify if it is zwave or zwave plus. If the 1st clusters listed in inClusters is 0x5E it is plus, if not then it is non-plus.
If non-plus, then you will need to use the Z-Wave Poller app to update the status when changed locally.
Smartthings automatically polls non-plus devices in the background, Hubitat does not.
My advice, as always, is to replace the non-plus devices as soon as you can afford to do so. Status updates are a pain, and the messaging is much slower than plus devices (40 kb max vs 100 kb max - 2.5x difference).
That's really impressive how SmartThings does that. It works 100% of the time and it's immediately after I push the switch.
Unfortunately the Poll app didn't work at all.
When you have unlimited cloud processing power, this is easy. Hubitat being local doesn't have this same processing power, so they do not enable it by default.
It didn't for me when I was on ST. But whatever - it is what it is.
In Hubitat if the devices are non-plus (I would verify that, don't assume) then you have to either use the poller app or Rule Machine to periodically poll status.
It's the SmartThings hub, not the cloud, that does this polling. It's Z-Wave, not cloud. Issue is, why poll unless you need it for a specific device. That's the difference between ST and Hubitat wrt polling of non-plus devices.
No worries! How well polling works depends on how many devices you have to poll, and how fast you poll them. Regardless of the hub, there is only so much "air time"/bandwidth on the mesh.
The more you use up with polling, the less there is for other traffic.
That's why a few devices might be fine, polling 50 MIGHT be OK (although you said you had 50+ switches on ST, it wasn't clear if they were all non-plus devices), 75 almost certainly would not be on any hub / on any single mesh network.
The point is to know the real status of each switch when ever I open the Dashboard, Home Kit and so on like I do in SmartThings. I can trust in what I see without having to keep refreshing them. In SmartThings app we use to have a refresh button easy to access and refresh the switch but I never had to use it. Besides the amount of rule I have to do many different things around the house. Like turn on the exhaustion when someone is in the shower. I have a app that subscribe to those events and control the whole house.
I also have a machine learning that is watching when any switch is on and off for predicting when that light should be on or off. I have been using those kind of things for personal study as well.
Anyway I have many, many things watching all the switches all the time and I never realize that SmartThings was polling it all the time but it was just working.
My intention is to migrate everything to Hubitat and keep it working as it was in SmartThings.
I'll give it a try with 1 second for all of those devices. I don't know how it works behind the scenes if rule machine will have one single thread per pooling interval.
I'm curios to know how SmartThings was handling that.
I think SmartThings had a trick to get the status.
When the paddle is physically pressed a message is sent to the hub which is needed for either device inclusion or device exclusion. When the hub got this message it then polled for the on/off or dim status since the switch may have changed state, on/off or dim.
I think this explains the difference between switches and dimmers.
For switches it worked fairly well.
For dimmers it requests the status but the dimmer has not fully ramped up or down at that time.
So if the dimmer was ramping up to 100% the hub might show the dimmer at 50% for example.
