~100 IRIS compatible devices of all kinds, including sensors, water softener, water heater, garage opener, smart buttons, cameras, lights, leak detectors, and water shutoff valves.
Trane Zwave/Nexia Thermostat -- unable to switch to anything else due to how trane implements most of its own HVAC features/intelligence within the thermostat.
~12 Nest Protects
Pentair Screenlogic Pool Automation
~12 Alexa Devices of various forms
Replacing the existing Clothes Washer/Dryer and Refrigerator will be the top of the line Samsung appliances which might be designed to connected to smart things
Going forward will also be replacing all the locks and putting more cameras in (unsure which vendor I will use..was leaning towards ring for cameras and schlage for locks...but very open minded at moment).
I also want to put into place more monitoring of solar panels/electrical panel/electric vehicle chargers
I may also want to eventually migrate out of aerogarden hydroponics towards something more home made and flexible.
I hate having to deal with a dozen different vendor solutions each with their own website and cloud infrastructure.
What should I watch out for in planning out a long term migration/consolidation and would Hubitat or Smart Things be best?
What flavour cheese do you like? What car do you recommend? What colour shall I paint my fence?
Regardless of which you chose theres time, effort and dealing with frustration going to be required. Hubtat and ST are the same but different. They both have their pluses and minuses though obviously you'll get an overwhelming liking of Hubitat round these parts (it is the Hubitat forums of course!). Both can be extended as you want but both may need to have drivers written to support the products you want to include.
Hubitat has the huge benefit of not needing to be online at all to work. It's self contained and apart from registration of the device you never need to connect the device to the Internet ever again if you dan't want to. It's also more organic and you can actually come here and if you're lucky speak to the developers/owners directly.
ST's been around longer and has more community written drivers/apps at the moment and truth is probably always will do. That said you are at the mercy and the whim of a massive multinational corporation and a cloud based solution so you have to suffer all the downsides to that. Never been an owner but a lot here have and theres a reason they're now here instead of there.
What are your fundemental goals for your new smart home platform? Ease of use? Simplicity? Mobile App?? If for example, those traits are of fundemental importance, SmartThings is worth a serious look. But not much else can be said in terms of advantages over Hubitat. SmartThings techincal support, for example, has become so overwhelmed that it takes weeks to get a resolution to a problem, if you are lucky to get one.
There's nothing wrong with diversification, especially when you can use a central hub to tie them all together. The upside is that an outage is not likely to affect more than one provider at a time.Yet, if the hub should fail, you still can fall back to each companies native app/website.
There IS a learning curve with either one. HE is still a whole lot less mature and will take more tinkering (KEEP IT SIMPLE!!) and is not as "pretty" or offers the same level of remote control. Both communities are great and you can get expert help from each.
For me local control was the major thing though - my home automation is now not tied to HE's future as a company or subdivision therein unlike SmartThings/Samsung .... and IRIS/Lowes .... and Revolv/Nest....!!!!!!
You have a lot of devices that are not supported in HE, so I would go ST....
No Pentair integration of any kind (although as a pool owner with Pentair Screenlogic, I still don't see why people want this in their home automation system anyway)
No Samsung appliance integration of any kind
No camera integration (at least not any that does much of anything)
I had SmartThings. I liked the ideas behind it, but after a few months, the poor reliability and slow responses (as it repeatedly talked to the cloud to do everything) made me look elsewhere. I've been very happy with the Hubitat since switching. It took some work to convert everything over, but now:
Devices respond fast (usually instantaneously or close to it)
The reliability is far, far better
If something is unreliable, it's my own code, and I've been able to debug and fix it.
My priorities are that everything must respond fast, reliably, and simply. I can't ask my wife to be an engineer to use the system. Hubitat has been really good for that.
The biggest thing you'll have to decide is "what is the user-facing interface?" Hubitat has the dashboards, but IMO they aren't developed enough for me to ask my wife to use them.
I've been very happy with a combination of three UIs:
First off, everything must be usable by switches on the wall. Visitors to the house shouldn't have to know that it's a smart house.
Everything is tied into Alexa, so we can control by voice.
And I use HomeBridge, so my wife can control things via the Home app on her iPhone. (BTW, Homebridge with Hubitat has been far more reliable than Homebridge was with SmartThings. Faster too.)
For what it's worth, as far as Cameras go, there really isn't all that much support in ST either. Yes, you can get some cameras to display on the SmartThings app on your phone but so what? As far as Cameras go, either system isn't going to give you anywhere near total integration yet.
MY UI needs are modest, web interface usually enough. However, I have a 4 member household and not all of them are tech savy or use anything but mobile apps.
Still, I've managed to handle IRIS to date for everyone via keypads, buttons, and Alexa.
Local Processing and overall reliability is very important to me. I hated when IRIS failed to implement this properly in v2.
Still, I am concerned about device compatibility....and integration. Especially, having one place where everything gets logged so I can have a record of which sensors got triggered when and in what order, so that I can troubleshoot events.
Hubitat as a master hub and smart things for unsupported devices might be the best solution from what I' hearing.
Even though I have had some issues with Hubitat and my ST setup is much more stable. I don't like the direction ST is heading with the new app and I see far more potential in the future with Hubitat. If my ST Hub were to fail or I were to start a new setup at a new location -> I would likely opt for Hubitat.
I have exctly the same jwetzel1492's UIs. Unfortunately the second could'nt be satisfied at the moment by HE (I'm an italian Alexa user and the HE Skill is only english…).
I'm very very undecided, as I would really prefer an HE but I must consider the family factor...
The question is do you trust cloud services and providers with this kind of control/data access? What happens when the product is EOL'd (End of Life) or the services are modified (ala Google Nest) ?
I would not use ST for anything I would consider "critical" to my home automation infrastructure.
I don't think I could stomach recommending ST to anyone at this point-- I would suggest avoiding home automation altogether before recommending ST. I convinced a handful of friends and family to buy a ST hub during my first year of ST use because it generally worked pretty well. That changed with regular cloud outages and slow or no fixes to certain problems. Perhaps things have improved over there, but the problems I experienced from a simple cloud outage were absurd.
I more or less treat HE the same as well, mostly from the fear of mesh issues. It really depends on my own perceived risk. I'm installing a DSC security system (with Envisalink), but at the same time, using zigbee leak sensors to control a Zwave water shutoff valve through HE.
Depends what you are doing. If you stick to the light automation app it's local triggers and fast but boy is it awful to keep straight. Want to use WebCore and get what RM can do well get ready for that cloud latency.
Bixby is being forced on users hard. Samsung is trying to get into the Alexa device game late and with not nearly the amount of features. Bixby also just sounds like awful robot where as Alexa, Google, and Cortana sound so much more natural.
And only if you use no custom DTH too. Remember, that if any device uses a custom handler on ST, all of the automations are in the clouds for that device. Also, if you have a group of devices and one of them uses a custom DTH, than that whole automation is also in cloud. When i was on ST I think I had one lighting automation that worked locally.
