I am planning on taking down Iris before pairing anything to ST.
The ADT ST hub will be installed on the wall fairly close to my main T-stat, about the middle point of the house, and an wasy uninterrupted walk from both front, and back doors, easy access to both power, and ethernet cabling.
This is slightly different from the Iris hub location as the Iris hub didn’t have a keypad.
I right now have only had to have a ZigBee repeater, which is why I got the smart plug, to keep my garage door sensors online. Everything else stays online without much trouble for the distances.
I only have 2 ZWave devices at this time, the Utilitech Zwave sirens. The thermostat, and Ring devices are WiFi, and the Iris contact sensors, motion sensor and smart plug, are all ZigBee, and have no connectivity issues excluding the contact sensors I have set up on my garage doors.
I have a few cameras that won’t integrate to ST sadly, they are IP cameras, Iris OC821s, there is a third party app I know of that will give me SMS alerts to my phone with the motion detection and record to my Google Drive account so I am covered there…
I am figuring I will have Ring covering both front, and back yards and all access points 100%. The side yards, and windows left uncovered by ring will be covered by the OC821s, and the Iris contact sensors. I will use the ADT Smartthings door and window sensors at the front and back doors, and the ADT motion sensor in the bedroom not covered by the Ring cameras / motion sensors. The Iris motion sensor can monitor the garage internals should someone be able to bypass Ring and open a garage door, or worse, my wife start piling junk out there again…
The floodlight cam has a wide enough field of view, and will be set back enough any approach to the rear of the house and the entry points there will be covered, including access to the side yards from the rear.
The ring spotlight cams will be mounted one above the garage to monitor the driveway and any approach to the side yard there, and attempts to access the property from the driveway side of things, a second one will cover the area that the doorbell can’t, covering the front bedroom, and the remainder of the front yard. Honestly if my doorbell wasn’t hidden so far back, it would be a lot easier to have just had the ring video doorbell just cover the whole front yard excluding the driveway, HOWEVER, the added benefit of the spotlight camera is aside from lighting, the siren…
After my research, for right or wrong, I have decided that I will be going ZWave with my switches and outlets. Starting off with the switch for the front door light. My intent is to allow the Ring camera motion sensor to pick up motion, turn the ring camera lights on, and delay a few seconds and turn on the front door light.
Moving forward, I am planning on adding door / window sensors to every available opening in the house, including replacing the Iris sensors if I opt long run to go with ADT monitoring. Again depends on what they do…
I will have a lot of rewiring to do including drywall work, and permits / electrician work to replace my single light on / off switches with lighting on / off switches AND fan speed controllers.
Long term this isn’t just about security, but at this point it is. Had I only wanted easy, DIY home security I would have gone 100% ring and been done with it. But I want security AND Home Automation.
I want to be able to set rules that say if the house is over X degrees, turn the AC on, and turn the ceiling fans on whatever speed in whichever rooms I desire. So say kick the fans on first at 70 deg in the master bedroom, living room, and kitchen, once it hits 73 turn the AC on to 73 degrees, and depending on the time, turn the fan off in the master, and maybe turn it on in say the studio.
I have top notch smoke CO detectors, and would rather not replace them prematurely, especially since the smart ones almost never have a hard wired option, so instead, I was thinking about using Alexa Guard as a listener for smoke alarms as well as glass breakage. Not sure how it will integrate with ST but it would be nice to send an alert and trigger the sirens if it detects either of those when armed.