Anyone who has had a good experience with SmartThings stability?

I’ve had my setup for about two years. I have about 50 physical devices, plus the cloud integrations with Harmony, Alexa, Ecobee, Ring, and Nest. I would say I’m above average in devices/integrations, but by no means a power-user. I play with many of the non-ST-approved smart apps, and a few devices that aren’t on the ST list. So with that in mind I would expect those to hiccup occasionally. But even those almost never do. Maybe I’m just one of the lucky oddballs, but I would say I’m easily 99% up.

And probably most of that 1% stems from me trying to over-reach on an overly complex piston in CoRE and not setting something up right.

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I’ve had a v2 hub since October. I only have 20 devices, and they are all either wi-fi or z-wave. I use SHM with presence (mobile phones). I had a few issues in the first two weeks. Since November 15, I haven’t had a single outage or hiccup. So 2+ months zero maintenance and zero failures. I think that’s pretty good for a DIY home monitoring/automation solution.

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SmartThings is amazing tech for the price. All of the automations I have should be a whole lot more than what I have invested in this platform.

Issues here and there? Yeah but not like some of the other projects I have tackled. This community is one of the best communities I have been apart of! The help is quick and mostly accurate. Seems like most people here are gunning to make ST an even better platform.

So far, there has not been anything that I can think of that has not been possible with SmartThings! Might not be native but someone has developed some custom app or handler to make it possible.

Hats off to SmartThings!

147 devices and counting.

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I agree with @JDRoberts, stability is in the eye of the beholder. If you’re looking for a ‘set and forget’ system with no maintenance and 100% up-time, ST probably isn’t the right thing. However if you’re looking for a home automation system that integrates well with a lot of products and services, but might take some tweaking and up-keep, I think ST nails it.

I’m relatively new to home automation and ST. I installed my hub Nov. '16 and now have about 50 devices on the network. I have personally had a great experience. Everything i have is working well, and it has been a blast to tinker with. The integration with Alexa, and the ability to set our EcoBee with voice have made a substantive difference in the way we interact with our home.

Forums are definitely a place where people tend to vent, and minor issues are often presented as deal breakers. I can say in my experience there are a lot of people out there using ST that are having a good experience, and don’t bother checking here daily like some of us. I purchased my hub in November and was shortly followed by 3 of my colleagues at work. We all started playing and loving the system. No stability issues, and I’m probably the only one of us following the forums. We joke about the ‘slippery slope’ that is ST… once you get started you can’t seem to stop buying new sensors and equipment!

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I’ve had my hub since July 2014 (still on v1). I would rate ST as 4.5 out of 5. Most of my issues are third party related. Android presence is a problem, but I know that is the phone’s issue, not ST, as other apps are affected too.

Here is a pic of my not recommended setup. ST hub next to Hue hub next to modem, behind my wifi router and Arlo router. Hardly any issues. Crazy? Maybe, but it works.

Just my $0.2, but I have had good luck with Smartthings. I got my v2 hub in November 2016 and have not noticed major issues. My selected lights turn on at sunset, I can check SHM status when traveling, and recently started adding more complex automations (for me) using CoRE, etc… The whole family has gotten used to telling Alexa to turn on/off single or groups of lights. The community offers great ideas and support and consistently impresses me. I was happy to find out when I purchased the hub to find out that my previously owned Wemo switches integrated painlessly.

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I’d been using BSR/Plug N Power/X10 to turn lights on and off manually for ages, and around the early 2000’s started automating with the CM15A programmable controller and a bunch of affordable indoor/outdoor motion sensors. Oh, and an obnoxious ding-dong chime for audible alerts. Heaven!

But even after (literally) years of fiddling with noise filters, X10 phase couplers, primary/standby controllers, redundant event timers, etc., I still found an occasional light turned on unexpectedly, or wouldn’t turn on, or sometimes everything in the house turned on for no apparent reason. I finally got the backyard motion detector functioning after I installed a dipole antenna in the attic and repurposed a cable TV amp to boost the signal. The simplest maintenance activity required physically relocating the controller and hooking it up to a PC. Anything more complex than setting its time of day clock required consulting a pile of notes accumulated over years of dealing with the quirks of the CM15A’s programming; all firmware updates had ceased years ago and eventually the vendor’s servers that were required to authorize re-installations of the PC based software were turned off due to bankruptcy of the parent company. New PC? New home automation system needed.

Having made the transition to SmartThings this past February, I was miffed to find that the level of reliability was about the same. Still need redundant event routines. Sometimes (though much less often, now) an automation doesn’t work. And once in a great while nothing works. But now my mailbox texts me when my mail is delivered and and can even tell me its temperature (I love data). A synthesized voice will (probably!) tell me which of my leak detectors has triggered, and I can talk to my house to turn off a light. The aquarium circulator pump turns off for five minutes after SmartThings reminds me to feed the fish, and will generate an alarm if it doesn’t start drawing 4 watts of power ten minues later. And if I can think of something else I want it to do, I can probably do it myself, or thanks to this community, pick the brain of someone who has already done it.

Sure, it still requires fiddling and sometimes disappoints. But for me it works well, almost all of the time, and the capabilities far exceeded my expectations.

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@Michael_Shutt, until 7 weeks ago, I would have told you SmartThings was the greatest thing I ever came across. A couple years ago I bought a v1 hub and immediately added about 30 “things” to the network. It was great… even with the growing pains and waiting for things that were never delivered by ST themselves, the community and ability to write device handlers and custom apps and share them has been absolutely wonderful.

That all stopped in early December when the cloud processing portion of the service suddenly stopped working. Its not a local configuration issue - dozens of us have the same problem that started at precisely the same time on different hubs and router configurations. The community has been very supportive and has helped ST narrow down that they have a cloud problem, but even the ST support team has admitted that the engineers aren’t particularly interested in finding out what happened. I’ve offered to help to a point (short of manually removing and re-adding ALL my devices and ALL my routines/rules/configuration since a migration tool is not available and will never be available). But, I have grown weary of the back-and-forth with support staff having no engineering support after the service went dark, and tonight I started looking for a replacement. There is no indication that the engineers will even start looking at this anytime soon. That’s been my experience.

Yea, I read through that entire thread a few weeks back. I’m sure it’s extremely frustrating for the folks affected by it. If support can’t get engineering to escalate that issue, I can only assume they have bigger issues on their plate. That isn’t really a source of comfort.

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For a $100 investment I made a year and a half ago, ST has delivered for me. I’d rate it at 4.5 out of 5.

Yes, I was there last Spring when all sorts of bugs and issues plagued the system. But aside from a few (literal) false alarms, the system has remained stable for me and I have about 100 devices by this point, ranging from sensors to locks and now Arlo cams.

Was I annoyed when my Routines weren’t working? Sure. Was I pissed that it seemed to keep happening? Yep.

But those add up to maybe 10 bad days to 500+ days of things working as they’re supposed to.

If my marriage had had that kind of record, I’d still be married.

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I’ve had a relatively positive experience so far. I joined the ranks three months ago, and have automated most of what I want in my house. My ST setup has been pretty reliable, with my LIFX wifi lights being the most unstable, but that is due to issues with my wifi range extender more than anything else. Sometimes my presence sensor of my phone doesn’t disarm my SHM prior to tripping a sensor, or my dogs trip a sensor, but other than that it’s pretty stable. Sure I have to power cycle my ST motion sensors from time to time, but I consider that just part of the deal.

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Yea, I think it’s very tough to argue the value. I replaced a “professional” system that probably cost 10k+ and had more than it’s fair share of reliability issues. It finally died altogether and was going to be several thousand to fix. No thanks. Even if ST is a bit flaky at times, I’m completely happy so far in comparison.

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