Cooper Aspire Switches with SH and Cooper Controller

Hi. I’m a new user (like 3 hours old). I’ve searched and can’t find an answer to my question anywhere. I have about 40 Aspire RF switches throughout my house. I control them using 3 different hand held remotes (and also 3 wall mounted scene controllers) which work great but aren’t much help when out of town which is why I purchased the SH. I can’t figure out a way to add the switches to the SH device list without taking them off the controller list. Is there a way to do this. It took a long time to program all the names into the cooper controller and create the scenes. Just trying to find a way to add them to SH without erasing all the controllers. Thanks!

I’m not sure… but devices usually/logically can only have one controller. Maybe just try removing one switch from the controller and try to associate with ST.

I don’t have any experience with Cooper Aspire RF but is the controller itself Z-Wave? Much like an Aeon MiniMote that can act like a controller itself but also connected to ST. At least you may be able to retain functionality of the controller if you like but device control would be through ST.

Sorry, what do you mean by “SH”?

If you mean the SmartThings hub, then, yes, as @Rhinesel mentioned, A zwave device can have only one primary controller, and that would typically be the ST hub (where ST stands for SmartThings). Although it is technically possible to add the ST hub as a secondary controller to another zwave network, it doesn’t work very well, and SmartThings officially discourages doing so.

SmartThings strongly discourages adding the Hub to another Z-Wave network. We cannot offer support for disconnected Z-Wave devices or the inability to add devices through the Hub as a result of including the Hub into another Z-Wave network.

SmartThings does not support “controller replication,” so as you’ve noticed, you don’t get a list of the old devices on the hub interface.

It also doesn’t support the kind of scene management that you are used to.

You could start from scratch adding all of the devices to the SmartThings hub, but that would require first excluding them one by one and then indeed rebuilding all the names and logic.

If it was me personally, I would probably try a vera hub rather than a SmartThings hub in your situation. Every system has pluses and minuses, but the biggest plus for SmartThings is its ability to create a multi protocol implementation using devices of many different types. It’s actually not quite as strong in a vanilla Z wave situation as some of the other choices.

Vera does support both secondary controllers and zwave scenes of the type you already have set up, and while I can’t promise that you won’t have to redo some things, I just think the transition would be much simpler for you.

Recommending a Vera… that’s just mean. :rofl:

Jokingly, if the emoji doesn’t show up. I was a Vera user in a past life.

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Every system has pluses and minuses. There are a lot of great things about SmartThings, but working well with already-installed Z wave scene controllers is not one of them. Just sayin’… :wink:

Hey guys! Thanks for the info and suggestions. It helps a great deal. And I think you’re right JD, perhaps a Vera Hub would work better. All I have is ZWave devices. I really like the control I get from the scene panels I have and from the hand held controllers. I just wanted to be able to control the lights when I’m away from home since I travel a lot and I can’t do that with the Cooper Controller. Thanks again!

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