I've just had an epiphany, one year after becoming a Hubitat owner

Having Hubitat Elevation is like being married.

Whereas having Wink or some other "user friendly" and less robust home automation solution is like being single.

Being married really sucks sometimes. But it sure beats being single. I mean I can be really frustrated with my marriage at times. But I never would want to go back to being single.

Man I can do soooooo many things with Hubitat that I was never able to do with Wink. And yet, with the clunky, discount user interface, the inability to mass-edit large numbers of device names, intermittent network slow-downs that are hard to pinpoint, discovering and rediscovering better ways of doing things that made me realize I wasted time needlessly, having to unpair and repair devices for various reasons, I have definitely spent waaaaaay too much time out of my life with this thing.

And then, I see a posting from another Hubitat user about a cool thing they made their Hubitat do, and just before I throw in the towel, I'm like, "Whoa! Cool! I want mine to do that too!" And then I'm at it.... again.

I wonder if this love-hate relationship with Hubitat is similar to anyone else's experience. :slight_smile:

10 Likes

Ironically, if I was single Hubitat would not get on my nerves as much because when I break things its ok to me, I can fix em, but my family gets annoyed. But I agree with what you are saying. All hobbies that use electrons come with a love hate relationship it seems. At this point I'm just hoping that I never file for divorce from Mrs Hubitat and more hopeful that Mrs Hubitat doesn't die on me to young. Of course if that happens, there's also a new model waiting for me. :slight_smile:

2 Likes

It is truly a labor of love and commitment..

Just wait till you start looking into running a companion server with software like HomeBridge and/or Node-RED... even more capabilities and possibilities.. :exploding_head:

1 Like

I can empathize with your sentiments, although I don't think I ever reached the level of frustration with Hubitat that I reached with Wink, Vera, and Home Assistant.

On the plus side, I really haven't messed with most of my existing automations now for ~1 year, although I did add a new zigbee coordinator for most of my zigbee devices about 6 months ago. My automations just work. These days when I purchase something new, most often it is to find out if it works better than what I already have in place, or because I'm curious.

7 Likes

I'm with you @aaiyar! Very stable base system except I keep adding stuff and messing around.

Although to your point am much more experienced about what I can get away with and how to recover should things go "pear shaped". I feel I have a good handle on most of the quirks & issues these days and if not - this wonderful community is here.
:grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

4 Likes

The single biggest cause of Hubitat issues is... me. If I just left stuff alone it would work great.

11 Likes

i enjoy HE as it's a nice middle ground. it's simple enough to make complex things happen, but not as complicated as HA where i need to make it a full time job to make it function

1 Like

I just saw a Facebook posting from someone showing a weather radar picture on his Dashboard.

Do I really need a weather radar? I am so oblivious to the weather that I will literally walk out of my car in overcast weather, knowing that I did not take my umbrella with me, only to be rained on later when I try to get to my car in an uncovered parking lot. As in, this happens to me multiple times.

And yet, radars are cool. I'm going to get that for my Dashboard. I have no need for it, but just because it looks cool, I'm going to figure out how to do that. Because g*ddammit! Radar!

1 Like

Better yet, get a weather station. The WeatherFlow Tempest looks truly awesome. Even better - @snell has written a Hubitat integration for it.

This is the next thing on my list .....

3 Likes

You are an evil man. You know that, right? :slight_smile:

Honestly, if you told me I could use Hubitat Dashboards to fire photon torpedoes, I would obsess over how to do it until I finally got it done.

3 Likes

On another note, if Hubitat is like being married, then maybe Alexa is sort of like the illegitimate mistress that causes her own share of problems. Wives and girlfriends don't get along...

2 Likes

I think if I were single, Hubitat would have less of a draw for me. Doing things like automation is less fun with no one to share it with.

2 Likes

Or just the opposite - you could do what you want with impunity and probably have the funds to make it happen! Who cares if it's overly complicated or technical - no WAF/PAF to tell you no! The sky's the limit!! :butterfly:

I know, right? I so want to invite people over to show off everything my Hubitat can do.

1 Like

My wife tends to be slow to adopt changes in home automation routines. I recently disengaged the Alexa Hue app to import all of my Hue scenes through CoCoHue. Now Alexa doesn't control the Philips bulbs properly and she lets me know it....

Hmm ... an interesting perspective. There is some truth to it, because there are automations that I can't wait to share with friends/visitors.

At the end of the day making your life better/easier/more streamlined seems to be the key. If you've done your job well then most things will appear boring or invisible.

My den lights are all Sengled Color+ and I can turn them different colors with Alexa. Cool looking but utterly useless for our situation. I'm much happier that my bathroom fan comes on when a certain humidity level is exceeded.

My bathrooms are doing that, too! Woo-hoo! Also, everyone else in my household has an annoying tendency to leave lights on in bathrooms. Very annoying especially when it's upstairs. For a while I would just tell Alexa to turn them off. Then I created an automatic turn off routine in Hubitat. Now I have sensors that turn them off when no motion is detected. So that is definitely cool!

1 Like

Of course, I probably could have just told them they need to do a better job turning off lights when they aren't using a room. But... Hubitat listens to me more often than family members. :frowning:

4 Likes

And now they have an excuse NOT to turn things off thanks to you!

:exploding_head:

Hubitat - destroying good habits one bathroom at a time...

2 Likes