I first off want to thank the community. I've searched and gone thought countless advice and posts and so many of you have been helpful. However, I'm having nothing short of catastrophic issues with my Hubitat. I have devices that stop responding at random and others that disappear, some take 15 minutes to respond, others that don't perform their Rules and my Geofence won't show any events no matter what I try,
I'm honestly not here trying to ask for support from the community as I've already taken all your helpful advice into account to no avail. What is disappointing is that I reached out to Hubitat on February 27th and I still haven't received a response. I've follow up and been polite and understanding but I'm at my wits end. I switched from ST over to Hubitat when I had no issues with ST. My motivation was the autonomy of having a superior hub without the need for the cloud.
I understand Hubitat is smaller and growing company, I don't expect Samsung money here providing support. But I don't think almost two weeks of radio silence is a reasonable amount of time for a response Even an email saying, hey we're busy and we'll get back to you as soon as you can.
Thank you everyone for sharing your problems and solutions, much of this has been very helpful. But my reason for sharing was to let you know that I think it's a little unreasonable to need to wait 2 weeks for a response from the manufacturer. Zooz and iBlinds got back to be within 24 hours and both followed up days later to make sure things were going well!
I'm just hoping someone from Hubitat sees this and understands why I'm requesting an RMA from where I bought the hub. That I tried, utilized this wonderful community but still think I should be able to reasonably hear back from Hubitat support.
Hi there, thank you for your feedback. I checked your tickets quickly and I see that you have one open. We have responded on March 1st requesting additional details. And you have last updated the ticket on March 4th. Earlier this morning we have reviewed your case and determined that it needs to be escalated to an engineer, and we notified you that we have done so. Our email may have ended up in your spam folder, if you didn't receive it. I will follow up with our engineers in the morning to see if they identified what might be the root cause of your problem, and will personally provide an update. Thank you for your patience.
I responded within minutes to the more information needed request. I provided only a handful of the issues I was having in my reply because the laundry list kept growing. Regardless it's concerning that it's still been 11 days from then and I haven't heard anything. I have also checked my spam folder and I have no missed emails from Hubitat.
My garage door only works every so often and through the tilt sensor is working it seems to believe it's in different states.
Sometimes hard wired light switches believe their are on when off and off when on and therefore don't respond to commands and apps. (Yes I do have Z-Wave Poller on for each switch)
Geofence still won't report or show up in any logs or events,
iBlinds only work 60% of the time, Each constantly believe they are open when closer or vice versa. Checked with manufacturer and confirmed I have the correct device driver. Excluded and Included many times.
I have battery powered motion sensors that include and say DC power and batteries last days.
Motion sensor apps that triggered device will take 15 minutes to respond.
Hubitat change the password of my door lock randomly. Or some how just deactivated it. I was able to reprogram the lock from the lock itself but I never tried to reprogram it from the WebUI at all.
Certain devices when switched on will turn on and then back off and then back on several times before it stays on.
Understand that I've searched forums and tried several things. But when I have so many problems I don't wish to reach out independently for each issue to the community when I would just like to speak to the manufacturer. I'm using basic apps here, nothing complicated.
I understand you would like to tackle and resolve all of the problems at once. Unfortunately, in a mesh network each problem must be tackled separately, as one issue causes problems with other devices and together affect the health of your mesh network, which is what is happening in your case. We are checking to make sure that you don't have a hardware malfunction, but based on the details provided, that doesn't seem likely to be the case. Much of the troubleshooting of these kind of problems must be done locally. Also providing exact make and models of any devices that are not working properly could speed up the resolution. After excluding and re-including devices, did you happen to click "Configure" button on the Device Details page?
When I said I didn't want to reach out independently I meant to the community. I wasn't comfortable going message board to message board pleading my independent cases while I was still waiting for a response from support. I will happily provide that when I received a response. And yes I clicked configure.
UPDATE: great news! Engineers have confirmed that you are not dealing with a hardware problem. The not so great news, is that you will need to tackle the various problems one by one, starting with changing the drivers to built-in. For example, our iBlinds driver for the models we tested, checks for proper settings when "Configure" button is pressed, and updates the parameters to ensure the device operates properly.
Also it appears that you have one or more devices at the edge of your mesh, which adds unnecessary traffic to your radio by generating frequent events. These events can come as frequent as few milliseconds, which may overwhelm your radio. To resolve this problem, you may need to add additional mains powered devices (repeaters) to strengthen your Z-Wave network. If you don't think the range is an issue, then make sure that the code for the custom drivers you are using is properly formatted to avoid unintended consequences. If you are not sure that a custom driver is properly formatted, you can always switch to a built-in driver (on Devices Details page scroll to " Device Information" section and change the "Type" to a built-in driver).
You've also mentioned that some switches show incorrect state. If they are legacy Z-Wave devices, it is to be expected, as unlike the newer Z-Wave devices (Z-Wave Plus) these are not reporting their state back to the hub when physically actuated at the switch.
Last but not least, you have some LAN connected devices that go unresponsive at times, and certain drivers may not handle these situations very graciously. If you have any custom LAN integrations, please disable them to see if that resolves some of the problems you've been experiencing. We have seen incidents where unresponsive devices can freeze hubs, which may inadvertently impact Z-Wave radio.
Feel free to PM me if you'd like us to further guide you on how to resolve these problems.
As of now I’ve done what you said. I’ve moved all drivers over to native drivers and deleted the custom one. It's been 4 days and there has been no improvement. I have 4 iBlinds units. When Hubitat wasn’t working with them I ran a test and moved 3 of them back over to smart things. They have been working on ST flawlessly. So the single unit “Bedroom Front Blinds" is still on Hubitat. This morning they did not respond the Alexa command to open them. Right now their current state says “opening” and its been about 15 minutes. So after removing all the other drivers and moving them over to native I am not noticing any change.
Secondly I would LOVE to see if i can get my Geofence to work. I created a mobile device from the WebUI and called it’s Patrick iPhoone with two o’s. This was I could tell that the app on iOS wasn’t just getting it’s name from the os but must be from the hub. I then set the home location to my actual home.
The phone accurately says inside or outside the geofence, but the webiu has retested no events in its history. I have mode manager set up and so i never make it to Away mode. I don’t know what else I could be doing wrong or that I should do.
This is not the method normally used to create the mobile app’s presence/notification device on the hub.
Typically, one does this directly from the mobile app by logging into the app with your Hubitat Portal credentials. Doing so will then prompt you to select your registered hub (if more than one on your account). After doing so, the mobile device will be automatically created on your hub and linked accordingly.
Thank you for the reply. I may have misspoke earlier. I think I tried both and the method you described is how it set up the second time. Either way I just deleted what I had before and started it again based on how you described and will check it out tomorrow. Thanks!
Hubitat is taking 5-15 minutes for motion sensors to trigger my lights, and blinds. I'm using all the native apps. I have a fairly simple set up. I received and email that said I should become a beta tester and use the beta app to see if that solves the problem. It was a very generic and unhelpful email. It also did not address many of the questions that I had ask. Hubitat has been unreliable from the get go. I've researched and scoured forums and boards trying countless different things,
I'm not just trying to have Hubitat just do this for me. I've had a smart home for many years and am by no means a beginner. I'm having issues that are beyond my realm of understanding and I'm honestly tired of waiting 3-12 days for responses that address 1 of my several questions. I'm feeling pushed aside and frustrated. I know I'm by no means your only customer and understand this is a smaller organization, but once again I'm not trying to do anything complicated here. I want my blinds to open when I hit the button, I want motion sensors to turn on lights and I want my house to know when I come and go. I have all the same devices I had when I was on Smart Things except they are not longer reliable on Hubitat. I knew it was going to be less user friendly. I know this was going to be a more hands on experience, but I am overwhelmed with my home in disarray.
I'm approaching a month of exterior lights not turning on, lights on timers not turning off, and honestly just any kind of consistency with any of my devices. I really appreciate what Hubitat is trying to do here and wish it would have worked out. I only had 30 days to return the device and that window is closed, I was hoping for support that would give me more than ambiguous responses. Bring told I just need more repeaters and to just keep trying different drivers and beta software, when everything worked with Smart Things weeks ago, I was just looking to upgrade to Hubitat. I have personal friends who has much more responsive and timely communication and I'm just out of time. Thanks for your time, I wish I had more.
I don't know if you ever described your home automation setup with Hubitat (number of devices, protocol, number of repeaters for that protocol).
A lot of people use the community site for support; if that's also the reason you're posting, I'm sure community members will jump in with suggestions if they're made aware of your setup.
Thank you for responding. I didn't go into heavy detail in the community, I was hoping my post would encourage Hubitat to finally reach out to me.
I have 50+ devices, half of which are Philips Hue and those have worked fine from the begging. I just feel like my laundry list of issues is so long that it would be a burden at this point. I don't like that it took almost two weeks for a generic response from the company.
For instance my biggest looming issue is geofence. Nothing I've tried will get that to work or register. If I could just get that working as a start I could maybe have more patience for everything else. I have it set up based on all available instructions and advice but I still have no registered events.
I know this will come as no solace to you, but I provide it as indication that Hubitat can and should be very very fast. Here's an example of an automation being run where a motion sensor on one Hubitat acts as trigger for a light switch on another. It is in the milliseconds.
Well, if you change your mind about using the community, feel free to post details about your setup. There are a lot of community members who are very knowledgeable about z-wave/zigbee/lutron, and willing to share their time and expertise.
This is an area outside of my expertise. I use something else (OwnTracks) for all my geolocation based automations.
My recommendation is to forget about using the Hubitat Mobile App for geofence-based presence detection. There are many other options available that are much more reliable, and still utilize only built-in Hubitat code. My family has been using the free version of Life360 for over 3 years now with Hubitat. It works reliably probably 99.8% of the time.
For Push Notifications, I use the built-in Pushover Notifications solution. (I actually wrote the original Pushover driver for Hubitat, so I am a little biased ;). The built-in version is essentially my original version - perhaps cleaned up a little by the Hubitat team.)
I really do not use the Hubitat Mobile App for anything these days. It is installed on my phone, and I use it sometimes to access dashboards, but there are simple ways to access dashboards from your phone without using the Hubitat Mobile App as well.
My motion based lighting automations occur in about 250-400ms. There is no appreciable lag. I use Zigbee motion, contact, and leak sensors directly paired to my Hubitat hub on Zigbee channel 20. This helps to avoid WiFi interference as long as my WiFi uses 2.4GHz channels 1, 6, and 11. For lighting, I use a combination of Philips Hue lights attached to the Hue bridge (using Zigbee channel 15 to avoid conflicts with Hubitat's Zigbee on channel 20) and Lutron Caseta Switches, Dimmers, Fan Controllers, and Pico Remotes.
This has been a very solid, reliable, fast performing combination for my house. When I moved from SmartThings to Hubitat back in Jan/Feb 2018, I learned that many of my issues were related to my old Z-Wave devices. These were the non "Plus" versions of GE's Switches and Dimmers. On Hubitat, they still caused numerous issues, and thus I replaced them with Lutron Caseta (which requires the SmartBridge Pro hub.) Afterwards, my wife actually asked me to automate more of the house!
My experience is similar to @ogiewon's. Replacing legacy equipment has made a huge difference in my home automation experience. So much so that after moving to Hubitat, I have run out of things to automate!
Thank you for the reply. I will have that a shot tonight. I still have a few more days before my return window closes so I will try these things. One of my issues with my switches is that my home is older and I have no neutrals and so it's near impossible to find switches that work in my home these days.
If you look at for instance this morning. You can see that the lights turn Ono both digital and physical, which neither were true. So 5 minutes later when I danced in front of the sensor trying to find my shoes to leave the house I had no lights because it would appear the system thought the light was already one.
dev:732021-03-16 06:51:55.066 am infoSide Indoor Light is on [digital]
dev:732021-03-16 06:51:52.320 am infoSide Indoor Light was turned on [physical]
dev:752021-03-15 06:56:01.352 am infoSide Door Motion motion is active
So here is a for instance. This mooring when I left. This light did not turn on to motion.
My personal favorite are the Inovelli (https://inovelli.com/red-series-dimmer-switch-z-wave/) but no neutral are becoming more available, I believe that GE and possibly Zooz also have them. Several people on here swear by Lutron Caseta but it requires the Lutron Pro Bridge to fully integrate.
