I was a long-time Vera/MiCasa user. I have not looked back. I grew tired of it after the UI5 upgrade and took away the delayed actions without doing a long script. I stuck with it for a few more years, but the lack of Google Home support was the final kicker. It may have finally happened but it was way too late and over a year of stringing users along I was through. When I received my Hubitat and had it up and running and my devices joined in short order, I was hooked. Boxed up my Vera that evening and recycled the next day.
I did not have too many issues with Vera other than that, but after the latest acquisition it had been nothing but missed promises for me.
2 Likes
Posted in another forum too - Vera Plus user considering jumping ship. I have an uncomplicated zwave network of about 10 devices.
1- firmware update bricked the device so bad it took tech support remoting in for 1.5 hours to fix it
2- Trying to add certain zwave devices blows away all devices (Schlage lock, Linear door/window alarm switch) and requires restore from backup
3- Detecting an offline device takes around 4-5 hours to get notification
How does HE fare on these?
1 Like
I orderd aC7. But have not got it yet.
I have a Vera plus now and a Ezlo Plus Beta.
I m givning Hubitat a try.
/ Mattias Sweden
I came from Vera to Smartthings to Hubitat. Smartthings was a night and day improvement over Vera mainly because I didn't have to be a dev to actually understand basic automations. It was unnecessarily difficult to do 'or' statements or even nested statements.
-
Because you can backup the device locally if it ever does brick you can recover. Worst case you can always factory reset. I don't think there has ever been a recorded case of an update bricking a Hubitat hub due to the way and how updates work.
-
Sadly you would have to completely reset your devices to get them working on a new hub (although there is work being done by the hubitat team to make it so you can go between their hubs without having to do this)
-
Detecting a device can be done as soon as the device itself reports offline depending on how you setup your automation.
1 Like
Same, I wasnt impressed with the Ezlo Beta on my Edge, mobile first is just dumb imo - HAC's need a web UI and the App is just a companion.
My intent is to migrate everything except my Thermostats* to Hubitat and use the Maker API and SiteSensor (on the Plus) to sync Home states.
*due to the WWN program being borked by Google and my Honeywell D6 Pro not having support in Hubitat afaik
2 Likes
Same here again - C7 on the way. Used Vera for many years, firstly with a vera lite, then vera plus. Maybe 40 or so zwave devices. Automation in vera was always pretty rudimentary, saved by PLEG, and I guess Reactor, though I never quite got into that somehow. While they made some worthwhile firmware fixes in vera the last year, it also became clear it is at a dead end and no more progress can be expected. No interest in ezlo as I see it so far - agree with mobile-first being generally stupid: ideally the automation should be set up to be not even noticed, and certainly not require fiddling with a phone to interact. The new vera/ezlo corporate "kill the messenger" attitude in the forums is also a huge turn off.
Most of my lighting is Leviton Vizia RF+ (so zwave non-plus), dimmers switches and some scene/zone controllers - will be curious to see how that all works; the leviton devices all do instant status at least under vera but I guess using some pre-standards protocol, so will be interesting to see if that can work under HE without polling. Converting logic to Rules Machine will also be interesting, though I can see some of the gaps which hung me up from converting from PLEG to Reactor may not apply.
2 Likes
I had a Vera Lite for about 5 years, and I liked it a lot, but it got bricked after a firmware update. I had seen a review of Hubitat on youtube, how lightning fast it was, and that it wasn't depended on the cloud, so that is what i went for.
Have been enjoying Hubitat Elevation (EU version) for a couple of months now, and I like it very much. The community is awesome, you get very much help by reading trough the forum, and you get many great ideas from the users.
I also use hassio and node red, mostly for my MAX! termostats, so i can switch between eco and auto on the radiator valves, from a virtual switch in hubitat.
Only device I cant get to work in hubitat is a NorthQ power reader, that reads the pulses on my electricity meter. It is a Zwave device, but there is no driver for it, so i cant read the output from the power meter in hubitat.
1 Like
This ex-Vera Plus owner is pretty happy. Took me just a few hours to get everything ported over. Most of the time spent fiddling with one switch that needed a driver change and using the Ring Range Extender as a power outage detector. I did have a firmware update hang this morning. However rebooting the hub fixed it.
1 Like
I'm still waiting for my C7 - Aus Post are taking an eternity due to the stage 4 lock-down here in Victoria! 
EDIT: lol, just after I posted above I got a notification from Aus Post saying it's coming today!!!! Woot!!
Greit! Sooo small but yet big ! Be glad your in no and not 3weeks ago..
1 Like
I have 2 Vera 3's and about 4 Vera Pluses now in my museum of abandoned home automation products. Vera was solid if you knew what you were doing and was able to make way with a great 3rd party utility for conditional actions. It was the memory leaks, not recovering after power recycling, learning the file system and what to clean up that drove me crazy. But once I was over that it was solid.
1 Like
I’m just glad mine is going to be relegated to HVAC management duties because I’m sick of even simple things failing.
Eg tonight I instruct Alexa to run our bedtime routine which triggers a Vera scene to put the house into night mode and, as happens far to frequently for my liking (At last once a week), the Alexa stuff runs but Vera does nothing.
I had to run the scene manually from the app on my phone. Just little things that all add up to a crap experience.
I'm about 3 weeks in having switched everything from my Vera Plus and I'm pretty happy with it.
There are some things Vera did "better" - mostly I'm thinking of older device support as I have a lot of older leviton dimmers and controllers. vera did track the "hail" command for these to enable instant status updates, and I'm still not clear on whether I should expect that from HE but it's fixable. Vera also did a much more elaborate programming on the Leviton scene and zone controllers, to set up direct associations between them and the target devices so that the control was then independent of the hub. That's not meant as a criticism of HE, these devices probably aren't popular enough now to go to the effort, and a community driver would be possible if it were seen as worthwhile (I'm not sure that it is).
On the other hand... the third party app support seems really good in HE, and having used PLEG and Reactor (I used the former a lot, never fully embraced the latter though both were much appreciated), I am finding Rule Machine to be very powerful. It exposes a lot of possibilities I never thought of with vera. I also really like having logs that show something of what is going on.
1 Like
What I'm loving is the integrations. I bought a MyQ garage door opener because it was $20 and the zwave ones were at least $100. But, I've now got it integrated into HE! And now, via Alexa, I can control my wifi door lock with HE (the zwave one destroyed my vera network, so I gave up). And I got the Ring Range Extender working as a power outage detector. All things that I couldn't get done with Vera.
1 Like
Is there an equivalent to DelayLight on HE?
I just want to set simple Timers for lights that the Wife and Kids leave on around the house - most dont have Motion sensors associated with them (motion sensors seem easy).
I haven't tried it, but my generic Zwave relay devices (plug in appliance modules) have an option to automatically turn them off built in in the device Preferences.
I'm still very new to the platform, but this is simple to do on Hubitat. A lot of the automation tools have a toggle for making actions delayable. If the lights are triggered using a button, probably the easiest way to do it is in button controller. You can add more than 1 action to a button, so assign turn on as the first action, and turn off as a second action, and delay the action for however long you want to leave the light on.
For switches, I know you can do the same thing in Rule Machine, I imagine that by using variables, you could make one rule that handles all of the lights you want to turn back off on a timer.
I think that setting is really to allow you to use it as a momentary switch. I believe the maximum delay is very short.
