Pre-move advice and prep

Hi folks - I have been using Hubitat and SmartThings in parallel forever and am now prepping to move to a new house. My thinking is to leave the SmartThings hub and take my Hubitat hub with me and set up my new home as a Hubitat only environment. It will be much smaller with fewer smart devices (at least initially) so I like the idea of simplifying and using only one hub. I am considering taking all the smart switches tied to Hubitat with me since they are all in the basement, while ST is in the rest of the house. I don't know how hard it will be to change the location and re-set the hub once I move. I am dropping this note to ask if anyone else has made a similar move, and if so, what advice you would give me about things to do now to make the move easier.

The chances are that whomever purchases your home will have no interest in a Smartthings enabled system. The home automation market is a niche. I have a number of friends who are retired electrical engineers. I cannot seem to get them interested. Thus, having the home automation system might be seen as a liability rather than an asset. Remember that your Smartthings hub is connected to your Smartthings account, so the new owner will have to set up an account and reconnect all the devices. They may not be able or willing to do that.

Hopefully, your light switches do not require Smartthings to function. I use Lutron Caseta switches that work just fine without any connection the hub. When I am ready to sell my house, everything other than the light switches and door locks will be removed before the house is put on the market.

If a hub is required with your switches, you might want to replace them with standard switches before your house is put on the market.

Once your house is on the market, anything that is considered a fixture must be left behind. That includes light switches and fixtures, door locks, motorized blinds, etc. To prevent issues after the sale, either remove everything before marketing your property, or specifically state in the sales contract which things stay and which things are excluded.

I may need to move soon and was thinking about this exact thing. On the one hand, any of my switches that are in the wall will (including the Lutrons of course) work perfectly fine without a hub. On the other hand, since very few buyers would care about having a 30-50 dollar smart switch over a simple toggle, I may actually remove all of the smart switches and put the house back the way it was when I bought it.

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Ken,

My advice is to leave all of the Z-Wave behind... In your new home, install a complete Lutron Caseta or Radio RA2 lighting system. In the long run, you'll be happy that you did! Everything Lutron 'just works', and it does so reliably. I have had zero failures in over 2 years of switching to Lutron.

The other nice thing about Lutron, is you'll have integrations with Hubitat, SmartThings, Home Assistant, Amazon Alexa, Google Home, Apple HomeKit, Logitech Harmony Hub, NodeRed, etc... And you can have all of those enabled at the same time, if so inclined. :wink:

Good luck with the relocation!

Dan

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Thanks all. Since ST can’t be transferred I will probably take both hubs.

My lights work fine without a hub so new owner can ignore the ZWave capabilities. If they want the smart home features they can install a hub and pair the lights. Every single switch is smart in my house so it would be a shame if they ignored it.

And Dan, my ZWave lights have all been rock solid for 5+ years. My only issue has been motion sensors that sometimes respond too slow to make the house feel as smart as it is. The Hue Zigbee bulbs have also been solid performers so I’m super happy with them too. The door sensors and motions sensors have been my only headaches.

I’m super excited about making my new house smart now that I have 7 years of know how under my belt. When I started on this house I knew nothing and ST was a tiny startup (and Hubitat didn’t exist)

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Sounds like a great plan.

You might want to do the new owner a favor and leave a note on how the smart lights can be reset to factory and paired with a new Z-wave hub like Hubitat.

I have found that the Phillips Hue Zigbee motion sensors work quite well. They are Zigbee 3.0 and pair directly with Hubitat. You do not need the Hue bridge. Zigbee motion detectors seem to be more responsive than Z-wave. If you are using Hubitat, the Zigbee motion sensors can be used to control Zigbee, Z-wave, Phillips Hue ZL, or Lutron Connect lights.

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Just documenting post move how things went. I ended up leaving all but 3 ZWave switches. The 3 I took were recently installed Inovelli switches that didn’t match anyway. In my new home I went all Hubitat and kept my SmartThings hub which oddly enough works much better than Hubitat at excluding old devices. So I use it for that and for the Ring integration. The Hubitat user Ring integration doesn’t work for my new Ring doorbell. For motion sensors I went with Third Reality zigbee and some Ecolink PIR ZWave and they work great. I have all the wall switches done and finally got the hang of Rule engine enough to automate things like I want. It took a few months for my ZWave mesh to get optimized. I didn’t go Lutron because I don’t like how they look and they are crazy expensive. I’m happy with ZWave. One small issue I’m working to resolve is how the bolster my zigbee mesh. I don’t think the motion sensors work as repeaters. Any advice on that?

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  • Outlets are the cheap and easy (but often an ugly) way to add some Zigbee repeaters.

  • The Ikea repeaters are less obtrusive, and can plug into any USB port. Some here swear by them.

  • Next on my list would be if you need some RGB strips somewhere, I have had good luck with the Gledopto controllers being repeaters.

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Thanks — I have several WiFi outlets sprinkled around my house anyway for useful things so I will replace them with Zigbee plugs. I saw the thread where @ogiewon recommemded the Sengled plugs so I bought a 4 pack just moments ago. The led strip is an interesting idea. Might add that to my system too

EDIT

The Sengled plugs arrived and I installed three of them and wow! They work great. No more Zigbee dead spots and the plugs themselves respond super fast.

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