So just recently got the shiny new Hubitat hub. C7. Firmware 2.2.4 just updated to .5 this morning.
Was going to migrate from ST but........
First Zwave device addition was an Aeotec TriSensor. Many struggles later including resetting Zwave radio because of a ghost node creation finally got it added.
Next up a GE non plus wall plug. Finally got it added after a bit of a fight. Controls fine digitally but does not register any physical button push changes. ST was almost instant. I realize that physical pushes are not going to be a way to control a wall plug but raises concerns on Hubitats integration. Have some automations on ST that depend on physical changes on wall switches. All GE legacy. If Hubitat does not recognize physical changes it will be a no go. Not changing 20+ switches just for Hubitat when ST recognizes changes very fast.
My concern is after reading through the community here is it seems to me Hubitat is not ready for Zwave or maybe just legacy devices in particular. Never had these issues adding or controlling Zwave devices in ST
I am not moving any more devices and may even send back the Hubitat hub now that it is not so shiny anymore.
I updated 4 hubs to 2.2.5.119 yesterday a C3, 2x C5, and a C7.
I had little to no issues and if anything my Zwave is working far better and much faster than it was.
I completed a ST migration to HE C7 for over 75+ Z-Wave/Zigbee devices. The Zigbee's went in like a charm, the Z-Wave devices required some long hours of trial and error. I read many community threads, sent emails to my devices support pages, and bought a UZB stick. Seems like a lot of headaches coming from ST, but I am not regretting leaving the mess that Samsung did to ST.
I finally was able to get 90% of all my ST devices to C7 with the Fibaro and Zooz ZSE40 motion sensors left on a C5 (I had bought it years ago for groovy development testing).
Turned out the C7's Z-Wave radio is kinda the culprit and HE staff is releasing updates to handle the issues. I still read all the HE forums tips & tricks for inclusion on the stubborn devices and work from the hub outward for powered devices first, let the network heal as they recommend starting a migration!
The C5 has always been rock solid for Z-Wave like ST was, but it is not as lightening fast as the C7.
Stick with it, I would never stay with ST after I completed the HE migration....
Thanx for the thoughts and experiences.
I have been with ST since nearly the very beginning hence all the legacy Zwave gear. Believe it or not I am still running on a V1 hub. It is slowly starting to fail and I had a V2 hub sitting in a box brand new. Never bothered to migrate to it after ST broke their promise of a migration tool. Started to migrate but then they got rid of the Classic app and with all their platform issues of late I stopped. I figured if I needed to do all this work migrating maybe it was time to switch platforms.
After the first issues with legacy Zwave on Hubitat I began to second guess myself.
The zwave poller app will poll the physical switch on your older GE non-plus switches and dimmers. I have 2 older non plus devices remaining on my system and haven't noticed any issues but I don't have them triggering any automations. Your use case may have different results.
In my opinion zwave non-plus works a little better on ST than Hubitat. ST had a lot of years to implement many clever workarounds and device specific tweaks to make quirky non-plus devices behave better.
That isn't to say they don't work on Hubitat - they do. And many people have been able to live with non-plus devices on Hubitat through the poller app, RM rules to refresh devices, etc.
That said, it is what it is, I wouldn't expect a lot of improvements on non-plus devices at this point. I highly doubt Hubitat is going to invest a lot of time or resources making non-plus devices work or respond better as they haven't been made in many years and it simply would not be a good investment on their part at this point.
I too just moved from ST after 6+ years, 4 of them great.
I read the forum way ahead of time making sure all my devices and products would migrate.
Blink, Envisalink-DSC, WebCore, Life360, Google Home etc.
The one glaring issue was gen 1 Z-Wave switches/dimmers. They do not report physical changes as in ST. ST had specific polling code to mask this deficiency.
I new I would have to eventually change to Z-Wave+, the price of freedom
There is a poller built in to HE but it seems to be a mixed bag.
For now I just don't sweat over the dashboards not being instantly correct.
I have just replaced and tested 2 new Z-Wave+ switches and I will now work through the whole house to gain a better mesh and instant updates.
I came over late last year, and I can say that ST has a better z-wave implementation that the C-7 does currently, but the C-7 is getting better. I would look at replacing as many of the non-plus devices as you can, even with the poller app, they seem to cause problems on the mesh with the C-7. (at least they did for me). Also the amount of devices seems to be a factor. My mesh had issues that "roamed" until I hit 12-13 devices, it's been rock solid ever since.
I really needed this thread about 8 weeks ago, so as to better manage my expectations. No regrets and no issues with Zigbee, but several Z-Wave devices have been weak links.
I also completely migrated from ST V2 to HE about a month ago. I agree with you, chasing Z-Wave issues wasn't any concern with ST V2 hub. But the frequent cloud outages, quirky mobile client and migrating from V1 to V2 was a nightmare. All that being said, when Samsung purchased ST, and they announced a less than ready platform/client, the writing was on the wall and I purchased a C5 and now have a C7 for device/app load balancing/redundancy. It is the best of both worlds since some of Z-Wave devices are better on C5 than on C7.
To be fair, the Hubitat C5 model (for me) doesn't have any Z-Wave issues when I had about 25 devices on it. The Z-Wave radio on the C5 is a 500 model just like the ST V2 so that is why they seem to work better with existing devices on the marketplace.
The Hubitat C7 has a 700 series Z-Wave radio with added device/network security and this is what (I believe) is causing quite a bit of the interoperability between Hubitat's O/S, the Z-Wave radio and selected Z-Wave devices. It is very frustrating to encounter device ghosts for so many of us migrating to the C7, but I am confident that HE's engineering staff are working 7X24 to minimize these issues with each patch they release.
BTW, I also purchased a UZB stick for times to remove stubborn Z-Wave devices....
I know I need to migrate from the V1 ST hub regardless. Never having to migrate adds an extra layer of stress but being brave and fearless I decided to add a GE wall switch. No issues whatsoever. Go figure. Tried the poller app on it as suggested and should work for the few automations I need physical state reports.
It is controlled by a V1 ST motion sensor. Added it and changed it to the correct driver no issues although it does not report battery level. The price to pay for being an early adopter I guess. Only have a few of those anyway.
When I decide to update to 2021 from all my legacy GE devices what would be the best wall switches and dimmers. I see Inovelli mentioned a few times. Any advantage to their red series over the black. Any others that work great? Any input is appreciated.
Sonos and Hue integration seems solid. Nice to be able to add my Hue motion sensor that I had laying around. Never got it to work proper with ST.
As a side note the community here seems quite helpful and positive. Nice change from the other platform.
Just thought I'd chime in here real quick with an easy comparison that may help:
It really depends on what you want to do with your automations. The Black Series is meant to be a more basic switch, whereas the Red Series has all the advanced features. The link above can hopefully break it down further.
Thanx Eric
The question I guess more specifically is to determine which is faster physically turning on both for the dimmer and on-off.
Wandering around the web it so far seems that the red series has a slight delay which I understand is from it waiting to check if more button presses are coming for scene control.
Does the black series have the same delay seeing it is not used for scene control?
Thanx
We use Inovelli switches and dimmers almost exclusively at our house. Only one that is not, is a Zooz fan/light switch. We have a mix of both black and red. We hardly notice the difference. We adjust sted the ramp and dim rates to very low values (1). The default rate made it feel like forever before the light came on. Being able to turn on multiple lights (or not) from a single switch is worth the slight delay for us. I just read this morning that a new firmware has been released that will let you set the delay time.
On the production version of the devices, we made a mistake and put that same 700ms delay on the Black Series as the Red Series.
However, we just released a beta version that will allow you to either remove the delay altogether or set the delay in 100ms increments if you want to utilize scene control on the Red Series.
Good news is with Hubitat, you can easily update the firmware on these devices over the air.
Thank you everyone for the information and perspectives.
Found out I did have a few Zwave plus switches in the mix. With ST I really didn’t pay attention if they were plus or not. They all worked or did not work the same.
I bought one Enbrighten switch and put it in a location where I needed the reporting.
Moved some zigbee motions sensors over and made some automations.
The one non plus switch automation I added earlier is just as fast if not faster than when ST controlled it.
The Enbrighten plus switch automation is slower than when ST ran the same automation with the non plus. Not by a whole bunch but noticeable.
Still not getting a warm fuzzy feeling about Hubitat and Zwave though. Never needed extra tools like a UZB stick to make things work before.
Will see how these few switches and automations work for a while. If they prove to be stable then we will dive deeper.
The biggest frustration with ST is it will work wonderful 90% of the time, work somewhat 9% of the time and just be an absolute mess the rest. And the new app and .......
If Hubitat proves stable 99%+ stable well then we will dive in.
You don't need those tools with HE either - it's just that it makes navigating the real complexities of home automation a bit easier.
By "real" complexities I mean how complicated the setup and acceptable operation of a home automation system actually is. Once you go beyond the couple of lights turning on and off stage things get wacky very fast.
It is my understanding that ST tries to (or used to, dunno if changed) mitigate this by using their cloud infrastructure to work around resource issues like frequent polling of Non-Plus Z-Wave devices etc. Of course doing this relies on a stable internet connection to function properly and this also means many more possible points of failure.
It really depends on your goals and use-case but HE is best if you want to remain as independent as possible and still have most of the ease of setup and use of the more "polished" but offerings from the big boys.
I had asked the staff about any metrics they could provide in reference to the amount of issues/user base and their response was ~0.05% of the user base has an issue. The biggest item to grasp is that this forum is such a tiny fraction of the user base and all the issues seem more prevalent than they really are. I fell victim to the over analysis of the 'all the issues' in the forum which is why I asked for any data.
Personally, knock on wood, my C7 w/~50 ZW (a houseful of Enbrighten switches and receptacles), ~20 Zigbee, Alexa interface, Node-Red interface, and a dedicated tablet with dashboards has been going strong since I started with it. No reboots necessary it just hums along. Originally I thought I was really lucky but I know now I'm more the norm.
Edit: Sorry, I forgot to mention that I'm an ST convert also. ST 'worked' ok but I would experience oddities every now and then otherwise with HE when I expect/need something to work, it just does.
I decided to add a GE wall switch. No issues whatsoever. Go figure. Tried the poller app on it as suggested and should work for the few automations I need physical state reports.
