Trying to justify this to myself, need some help

Not sure I follow?

I just meant that the smartthings platform as a whole (for me) was made by the contributors to their community forums. I'm sensing it's the same here too. It was a simple compliment to the coders.

=)

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The cool thing is you can buy an HE and slowly migrate things over and give it a go.
Don't like it, I'm sure you can re-sell it at a very low loss.

Big sticker for me was local. I get to choose what I want to rely on cloud access (e.g. the community Ring integration).

I couldn't be happier after having gone through Wink and ST.

You should remind ST of that. They are the ones closing off dev access to the IDE like @aaiyar said. That does not sound like a very "community" focused company to me.

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If ST works then why change it? Just keep using it until the wheels fall off. That's more or less what I did with Wink until they decided to implement their subscription model.

I like to refence the table on hubitat's page with the differences between the popular hubs to justify "why HE"

The most important thing to me is "Works without internet" and "Backup to local PC"

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I'll +1 several the comments here from @Shaneb, @aaiyar, and @TechMedX. If you're happy with ST and it 'just works', stick with it. But if you're looking for more than 'just works'...be prepared for some head scratching and working through the forums, but if you're lucky to have a significant other that is willing to put up with some experimenting, HE opens up a lot of doors and a lot of fun...

I came from ST a few years ago and haven't looked back. I like the local execution and reliability of HE, and the community here is beyond helpful. You don't get the size of ST as a company with HE, but IMO the community help I've gotten here versus ST made the switch beyond worthwhile.

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You mean like light switches half hanging out of the wall while you are tying to diagnose why something isn't working. I will never admit to how long.

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Welcome to the HE community ! ,\0/

If your happy with ST, then why are you here ??

I was going to post the same, if you'd not got there first

Some people just like trying out new things. It's one of the many reasons people might look beyond something they're happy with

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How about if I'm an unhappy Vera Plus user? Good reason to switch? I have an all Zwave network, nothing too complex. I'm tired of firmware updates bricking the controller, trying to add a device and the entire zwave network is deleted and has to be restored. This is happening with a simple Linear switch right now, and I could never get the Schlage zwave deadbolt to work either.

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Welcome to Hubitat and the answer is definitely yes!

I've never heard of this happening on Hubitat, but just judging by the number of Vera users in apparent shock that the standard local hub backup only backs up the database, not the radios, It's obviously a real problem on that platform.

My wife would kill me :scream:

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Welcome to Hubitat and the community. I've never had a bricked controller or borked zwave network on Hubitat. Sounds like it would be a good reliability improvement for your house.

(That said, one word of warning about something else you said: You mention having the Schlage zwave deadbolt. Those are known to be problematic, even on Hubitat, because of flaky firmware inside the device. I've been involved in the efforts to make smartlocks more reliable - wrote several apps for it - and I've come to the conclusion that I can't recommend any z-wave smartlock, and the Schlages are the worst. However, the various zigbee smartlocks are much better.)

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I haven’t tried any of the Z-wave locks, but my Kwikset 914 & 916 Zigbee locks have been my favorite recent addition and can be had cheap if you can find a Lowe’s that still has any. They all were paired in place and have not missed a command yet. The last one I bought on clearance was a 914 for $39.

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Agreed. I get 100% reliability from my Kwikset zigbees.

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@tthoma

I have two zigbee Yale locks, and they work well with Hubitat. That being said, @mike.maxwell indicated it is possible that Schlage locks may work better with the new C7 hub than the older Hubitat hubs (C5. C4, C3) because the C-7 has a brand-new z-wave stack that handles S0 encryption and retries better than the old stack.

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Ooh, interesting. Is that referring to something inside the new z-wave radio? Or is it something in the Hubitat firmware that they upgraded?

This.

Yeah I gave up quickly on the Schlage deadbolt, because adding it to the network would kill my entire zwave network. If you don't care about it interfacing with your controller (I think it does with Alexa and Google), I can recommend the wifi version. It has its own app and works great. I needed something quick after hiring a dogwalker that I did not want to have 24/7 access. I didn't even try the zigbee version. I wanted the Schlage because I already had the matching hardware.

I have the Schlage BE469 lock and I can confirm that I just paired it without any issue at all with my new Hubitat C7 hub. The Hub and lock are about 15 feet apart as well. I am able to lock and unlock it with no issues from the device page. We will see if it stays as stable as it did with ST but so far so good.

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I never said the company were community focussed. Far from it, which is why I'm starting the migration. I'm sick and tired of random, unwanted changes which sometimes breaks things I've had working for years. Case in point, a fairly recent firmware update just before our new baby was born rendered every one of my temperature sensors (fibaros), alarm keypad (linked to fibaros) & central heating boiler switch (zwave) completely unusable. Which obviously knocked out my CH and all 7 of my smart TRVs. And the behaviour of my fibaro dimmer (front room main lighting) changed to something, well, bollocks. Overnight. Nothing I can do about it.

Woke up one morning because my bedroom was boiling because all this crap had stopped working in the middle of the night and my 'failsafes', well, failed - because the boiler could be switched on but not off! And none of the temp probes had updated since midnight or whatever.

All due to a crap firmware, which took best part of a week to sort out.

What I specifically did mean was that the guys in the forums were EXTREMELY community focused. Including some of the smartthings staff who went above and beyond. It was those guys and some of the users (of which I see some are present here too, @ogiewon etc - I haven't looked around much here yet) who really made the platform what it what over there. From the small amount I have been on these forums it seems it's the same thing - users are falling over themselves to help, assist and generally be friendly. Which is exactly what happens over at the ST forums too. Don't for one second think I'm singing samsung's praises.....

The company itself? Shocking. Abysmal. And the latest announcement is pretty much that samsung are killing off groovy etc because essentially it's became too much of a drain on their servers. Which means even more cloud reliance (although they said something about trying to make more things run locally like smartlighting and virtual switches, but overall.....meh.)

I'm shifting because I want something that just works. Period. From what I've read, that's hubitat.

= )

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Wow...you guys are amazing, really appreciate all of the replies, and especially the fact that they provided details and experiences good and bad, were balanced and objective. Folks stayed away from HE fan-boy replies, which is perfect.

@jwetzel1492, thanks for that table, that is helpful to see some specifics listed out in that format.

I was pretty concerned about the Schlage comments. Mine works perfectly w/the Rboy apps on SmartThings so I don't want to lose that, so migrating it may not happen. But it does sound like @chipworkz experience has been better than some, w/the same lock I have. I'll have to understand what functionality I lose if I tried to move the Schlage over to HE, My main needs are automations to auto-lock after a certain amount of time closed/unlocked, to allow me to set codes for family members, and to get notified (push/text) when codes are used to unlock the door, or if there is a manual unlock.

Overall, I think that @dadarkgtprince may have nailed it when he noted:

I believe that is the situation I'm in...driven maybe by how "boring" SmartThings has become, not needing any of my attention. :wink: I've pretty much automated everything my family needs so of course the evil part of my brain wants to find a way to mess things up again so I have to fix them. :smiley: As Dave Barry said, the two most dangerous activities of humans are wars and home improvement projects.

Great info and help, really appreciate it very much!

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