It was almost exactly 1 year ago that I placed my order for my Hubitat Elevation Hub. The news that an amazingly talented team of former ST Community Members had gone off and created "THE Hub" that we all desperately wanted came at a time when recent cloud issues were fresh in my memory. The announcement was music to my ears! Once I found out who the Hubitat Dream Team was, I basically said "Shut Up and Take My Money!" My hub is number 21 of the first 250 that came with a hand-signed congratulations card from the team.
It has been a great year for me personally, as Hubitat has given me reason to be excited and enthusiastic about my home automation hobby again! I have also greatly enjoyed this wonderful community of like-minded individuals who collectively make Hubitat "THE Home Automation Platform" to be part of.
Almost a year ago for me, too! (Hub number 24...not counting my second one.) I had just finished migrating most of my automations and all devices that I could from SmartThings to Home Assistant and was quite pleased with how fast and reliable all my local execution was. But I couldn't do 100% of what I had on ST--some devices wouldn't work, some automations I just hadn't recreated yet, and the like (to say nothing of me becoming a part time Linux sysadmin to keep it all working). I was excited when I heard about Hubitat but hesitant to move since I had just finished moving so much. But then I found out who belonged to the team behind Hubitat, and I was sold:
I've probably sold at least a few other people on it on various home automation forums too.
My favorite thing initially was that ST and Hubitat's ZigBee support is unparalleled, something that definitely matters to me having come from ST with many such devices--and being a fan of motion-based lighting automations, Z-Wave sensors tend to be too slow for my needs. Vera Plus did not support most of my ZigBee devices and still doesn't; Home Assistant worked OK with most but at the time lacked a good interface for pairing and removing, and it also had no user-accessible method to add support for custom ZigBee devices. Now that I take device compatibility for granted--something you shouldn't do considering the landscape--I continue to enjoy local execution of both native and custom automations and the speed and reliability this provides. The staff are, of course, still excellent and helpfully engaged with the community (that's us!).
I have to admit, I'm a little bit jealous. I thought for sure I would be in the top 250. When I flipped my hub over and there was no sticker I made a face.
I got over it the minute I fired up this bad boy and connected my Lutron hub. I haven't thought about it till @ogiewon reminded me this morning . I echo his thanks.
Like you, I'm not in the early early adopters club. I placed my order after you (because seeing that you had one was a large part of my purchase decision) on February 20, 2018.
It has literally been one of the finest experiences I've had since I started learning about and buying into the Smart Home and IoT products. On to year two, I wish Hubitat nothing but continued success. The formula and effort is definitely right to make that a reality.
I left SmartThings the minute they announced that they were dropping support for Windows phone. I even had just bought a V2 hub, ended up giving it to a friend. I went to Vera, but while I enjoyed it at first their lack of good ZigBee support (smart bulbs especially) left me looking for more. Somebody had posted on the Vera forum about Hubitat and I was like "What is this???" I ordered a hub shorted after that. It has been the best decision I have ever made in the home automation realm, my hub does (almost) everything I need it to do and more !
Indeed Happy Birthday to Hubitat! I'm number 31. I will never forget how Bruce helped solve a problem in the early days of SmartThings by writing a custom app for me and was quite sad to see how he was treated when that hub had a cloud meltdown and Rule Machine was blamed for missing state data. So it took about a millisecond to support his new venture. Thanks and good luck to the entire Hubitat team as the vision evolves.
Just checked my PayPal receipt: #23, ordered January 29th and put into operation a few days later. Aside from one Zigbee offline episode (fixed by a simple reboot and never since repeated) it has been a smooth ride: no lockups or slowdowns running 65 real and 36 virtual Zigbee/Z-Wave devices-- among them the infamous Cree & Osram repeating bulbs, Xiaomi buttons, polled GE switches-- with 70-ish instances of rules and native apps... and still smoothly running WebCoRE with 18 pistons I just can't live without. Appreciate the many enhancements and prompt bug fixes; love being able to backup/restore and update when it suits my schedule and of course grateful for the efforts of everyone involved in producing and supporting this platform.
Looking back on the last year, I can't believe how far HE has come. I didn't even hear about it for a few more months---which led to my immediate purchase as soon as I'd heard who the team behind it is (something it sounds like a lot of others appreciated, as well)
It's easy to look over and forget about all the progress, and this is a bit cliche, but I can't wait to say 'look at how far it's come again' next year!
I just got mine a couple days ago but yeah, wish I had known about it sooner, so I wouldn't have invested in SmartThings. Luckily all my devices (and then some) work w/ Elevation, so I'm just out the expense of a SmartThings hub, but still.
About 3 years ago, I decided to go with 'modern' HA, rather than continue to pursue hardwired controllers with line-voltage contactors and Leviton digital time clock devices. I had been looking for local-only, mostly watching Vera. The hunt went cold for a good while. I went with TP-Link rather than replace a Leviton time clock. I caught the bug and did a 2nd one. Then I did the mini-blasters on the Roombas to get rid of setting their internal scheduler. But I hate phone apps. I knew I hated phone apps from the git-go but there really wasn't much choice. Thankfully, some redditor mentioned hubitat deep in the HA threads. I bought mine in August.
Thanks to all the staff, develops, and owners who saved me from app hell!
face.
. I echo his thanks.
said!
!
. Holy Moly..I guess I jumped in when the flood gates opened.
