I figured I would post a quick reply here in case other folks are looking.
About 2 months ago, I had ADT pulse installed. They installed 3 security cameras, updated my panel electronics, added the ADT Pulse Z-Wave gateway (the black one by Netgear), 1 Z-Wave door lock, 1 Z-Wave garage door opener, 1 Z-Wave plug-in switch, and 1 Wireless keypad.
All of this stuff worked great…and I became addicted to having a “smart house”.
Since their install, I have added 22 Z-Wave switches (a few are dimmers). I used the new GE/Jasco Z-Wave plus switches. Also, added a few 3-way (and 1 4-way) switch.
At first, I was in heaven. However, the ADT Pulse automation couldn’t do everthing what I wanted to do.
I bought a SmartThings Ver 2 hub, and added it as a secondary Z-Wave controller! Yay…more automation possibilities.
To add the SmartThings hub as a secondary controller, go into the ADT Pulse portal on your PC, and put it into the “add a new Z-Wave device” mode. (System --> Manage Devices --> Devices --> Add). When it starts doing the “spinny thingy”, go into your SmartThings IDE on your PC --> My Hubs --> Utilities (View Utilities) --> Z-Wave Utilities --> Join/Leave another Z-Wave Network.)
This has to be done while the ADT Pulse system is looking for a new Z-Wave device.
The ADT Pulse system will time out and say that it can’t find a compatible device, however it will give the SmartThings Hub a Z-Wave address.
Now, go into your SmartThings smartphone App --> My Home --> Things --> Add a Thing. Let it look for devices…it takes a bit of time to find all of the Z-Wave devices.
When it’s done, the Z-Wave devices connected to the ADT Pulse will now be available in SmartThings. Make sure to “Refresh Mesh” in the ADT Pulse system when SmartThings is done (System --> Manage Devices --> Devices --> “Refresh Mesh”) so that the SmartThings node does the Z-Wave repeating properly.
With this setup, you can control Z-Wave devices from either system.
Whatever the ADT Pulse system does for polling is superior to SmartThings. The ADT Pulse will always find a SmartThings Z-Wave activation within a few minutes (on my 30-ish node system). The SmartThings doesn’t always get a device activation done by ADT Pulse.
The ADT Pulse gets manual activations with the same reliability as a SmartThings activations. However, the SmartThings doesn’t always get manual activations.
To make this better, I installed the “codersaur : Z-Wave Tweaker” utility to set the “Life Line” associations to both the ADT Pulse hub and the SmartThings hub. When I did this, both the ADT Pulse and SmartThings see manual activations within 1 second.
For “key logic” events that I implemented in CoRE that “need to know” when the ADT Pulse does something, I implemented a polling routine (it samples 2 Z-Wave devices).
Needless to say, I have had several Nergasms while doing all of this. I told my wife that a “Smart House” is my mid-life crsis!
Since this, I have added Zigbee devices into the SmartThings.
SmartThings isn’t 100%, but it’s getting there.
Hope this helps!
Oh - and in this journey, I had the “Great Internet Outage of 2017” (as seen through the eyes of a 12 year old) because the cable company is a bunch of dorks. As we know, SmartThings won’t work with a bunch of stuff if the internet is down. I decided to take a look at Vera (Vera Plus to be specific) to see if I could get more “local processing”.
Vera is JUNK…total JUNK. To say that their software is in Alpha development stage is generous. Vera totally wouldn’t work reliably for more than 5 minutes. In the process, Vera totally dorked up the SmartThings AND the Z-Wave devices connected to the ADT Pulse…even though it was setup as a secondary controller.
I had to factory reset the SmartThings hub and all of the Z-Wave devices. Add them to the ADT Pulse again, and then go through the above to bring everything back into SmartThings.
To say I was dissapointed is an understatement.
The most positive thing I can say about Vera is that when I called their tech support, I spoke to a human (who barely spoke English). This guy tried to help, but he was totally clueless. After 70 minutes on the phone (after pulling my hair out for over 12 hours), I punted Vera.