I received a WInk hub as a gift and have not been happy with its performance. I have several GE Link LED’s, so I needed a hub that would be compatible with them. Smart Things has received a lot of positive reviews, so here I am!
Since I travel a bit, it was important to me that I could control my lighting when I’m not at home. The problem is, when there is a power outage, the Wink hub doesn’t reconnect to my wifi router when power is restored. I have to be home to manually unplug and plug the hub back in. My main problem with this is, when power is restored, every light in my house goes on and I can’t remotely control them until I can get home to manually reset the hub. When I’m out of town this is a bad thing for me because, if it happens in the early morning hours or during the day, it looks as if no one is home when all the lights are on.
Wink tells me that this is a function of all similar hubs. Well, I thought I’d check that out for myself. If this is true, it’s a real problem for me.
Yes… Once your router reboots, the ST hub will reboot. And @allison is correct. ST does not have wifi. But your ST hub will be up and running once your router you have it connected to reboots after a power failure.
The hub plugs into your router through a wired lan connection. You will receive an alert from ST on your phone when it cannot connect to your hub and your hub should reconnect automatically when the power comes back on.
The real issue may be though that depending on how long your power was off, ST may loose connection with the GE Bulbs. This would happen with any hub, not just ST or wink
Oh, I didn’t realize this was a wired connection. Well this is outstanding! Power outages normally don’t last long, but I wonder how long does a power outage have to be to break the connections to the LED’s? We have small power outages off an on that don’t last more than a minute, but that’s long enough to break the Wink hub connection to wifi. I just couldn’t understand that, if the whole idea is to control your lights remotely, what kind of sense does it make that you have to be home to control your lights after a power outage? There is also an irritating delay from hitting the button to turn on a light to the point where it actually turns on. Anyway, thanks. I know this technology still has its issues with stability, etc. but it’s still amazing and I’m willing to go along for the ride! I use my old smartphones as cameras in the house for free so, slowly but surely I’m getting automated.
Now to find a Smart Things hub… Hmm… I may wait for V2. It looks like there are a few more bumps in the road right now than I’m willing to endure.
I’ve had several power outages in my condo, the most recent one cause by a fire in the complex. SmartThings has always reconnected and everything has just worked afterwards regardless of the length of the power outage and I have about 50 devices. I’ve read horror stories from wink hub users having to constantly reset their hubs and I can gladly say SmartThings is way more stable. I’ve had way more problems with Time Warners equipment and lines than anything else and SmartThings have helped to expose that.
If you are not geek I’d recommend to stick to devices on this list: http://www.smartthings.com/product/works-with-smartthings/
If you are… * Evilgrin * it really opens up some possibilities.