Advice on using 2 hubs

Hi all

I am looking for a bit of advice. I use ST at home and have it all set up fine, but I want to also set up a hub at my holiday home. I am after a bit of advice on this please.

  • Can you have 2 hubs registered to one email address?
  • Can both be controlled without logging in and out of my account on my iphone?
  • Can 1 presence fob we registered to both hubs or will I need 2 fobs per person?

Any other advice you may have for doing this would be welcomed.

Thanks for your help

  1. No problem
  2. No Problem. You will have to change the Location though via the mobile app. (i.e. :/My Locations/Select the Hub to Control)
  3. Not sure

A Zigbee or Z wave device, including the fob, can only be paired to one controller. So you would need two fobs, one for each hub.

I originally believed you could have a phonebased presence indicator work with both hubs, but @joshua_lyon corrected my error in his post below, so I have edited this post to remove that reference.

Unfortunately, any third party service that integrates with SmartThings will be limited to interacting with a single location based on the current state of the OAuth implementation without some clunky workarounds. A third-party software company can perform multiple authorizations to the SmartThings platform, but they would have to manage all of the logic and taxonomy within their application. I don’t know of any apps that make calls to multiple SmartApp instances from a single third-party app instance.

Help with multiple locations

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I believe SmartThings native phoned based presence is supposed to work with multiple locations(hubs). However I never really got phone based presence to work with either so I can’t say that for sure. For presence we have been able to work around the issues Josh described with Life360.

So Life360 knows when I’m at property A or property B. Life360 is directly connected with SmartThings property A. So I can have presence events triggered from that integration. Life360 is also directly connected to IFTTT which is solely connected to property B. So I can have presence events triggered from that integration.

As to the OP question, I’ll just say when I decide to move to Hub v2. I will probably create it as a new SmartThings Account and go with a 1 location/account setup. I feel like this will give me the most flexibility, and I don’t see SmartThings prioritizing 3rd party multi location support any time in the near future. I plan on using the google ability to treat name@gmail.com and n.a.m.e@gmail.com the same in order to create distinct accounts using the “same email”, and to use Account Sharing to allow control without logging in/out.

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Similar concept, but I use the Gmail ninja trick that name@gmail.com and name+topic@gmail.com map to the same email, but can be used for creating multiple accounts. This lets me more easily setup spare accounts for development and testing.

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