Crossed location with Echo in two houses

[Ernie_Sharp]

My Father in Law and I both have ST installed, and use Alexa as a voice control. He needs to be able to enter our house when we are on vacation, so we added his cell phone to our ST so we could use it as a presence sensor and it would deactivate the alarm when he arrived.

We had been having all sorts of problems with devices randomly turning on and off, and I had been tearing my hair out. The device history would always say “light turned on by Alexa” I had even posted on these forums, trying to figure it out.

After a year of dealing with our issues of random device activation, my FIL called and asked me to come over and help him figure out why he had no control over one of his lamps. Looking at our phones side by side, I finally realized what was causing the problems.

Somehow, the Alexa in his house had discovered the devices in both houses, even though the Alexa at each location was attached to different accounts. The ST app only showed the devices installed in each location, but the Alexa devices were controlling the devices of either house.

Since some of the ST devices had similar names and my mother in law can’t ever seem to remember what a device is called, she would yell out random device names that sounded right to her, until she got what she wanted: “Alexa turn on the lamp.” then “Alexa, turn on bedroom light,” etc.
When the names she was shouting matched one at my house, the lights in my house would turn on.

I solved it by removing him from my ST app, and we haven’t had a problem in weeks. Now I just have to figure out how to let him in the house. (The key fob presence tags don’t work for us)

[JDRoberts]

Yes, this is a known issue. There are a number of discussion threads about it going back to 2016. Smartthings will expose multiple locations to echo, but which one it will control at any time seems to be random. You can’t assign a specific Echo to a specific SmartThings location.

The solution is to have two smartthings accounts and two echo account, although that doesn’t fit for everyone.

Previous discussions include:

Amazon Skill and multiple Smartthings locations issue

I’m hoping someone can help me sort this one out… Short version. I currently have 2 “locations” in my smart things account, my house and my Mother’s apartment. When I go to enable my Smartthings Skill for my Amazon Echo I choose to link it to the location which is my house. When I go to have Echo scan for devices however it picks up the devices at the location which is my Mother’s apartment. Has anyone been able to get the Amazon Skill to successfully work with 2 different Smart Things locations? And, yes I have tried choosing the location that is her apartment thinking maybe they got mixed up somehow. No mater which location I choose I get her devices.

Multiple Smartthings locations each with their own echo dot?

Here is my situation. I have a ST hub and devices at my house, and my father also has a ST hub and devices at his house. We also both have Echo Dots installed. We each had our individual systems working fine with my Dot working with my ST hub and his Dot working with his ST hub. My father added me as a user on his ST, which is on a separate account. When I accepted, suddenly my echo Dot no longer works with my stuff, but I can turn on his lights and other devices by talking to my Echo Dot which is physically 50 miles away. I have tried many things to get around this with no real solution. I have a sub-standard solution, but is not acceptable as far as I am concerned. What I would up doing is creating a new e-mail account and a new ST user account under that e-mail and my father added …

PSA: If two locations/hubs both have Alexa + Smartthings integration - Alexa will only be able to control devices from one of them

I just thought I’d post this in case it tripped up someone else I already have an echo with a large amount of lights hooked up to it. I decided to buy an echo for my dad who has 5 lights total, and then set it up so that he could trigger them thru alexa with the smartthings integration. He has his own amazon account + smartthings account. I went home and then noticed that none of my commands were working, and that only 5 lights were showing up in discovery after I deleted everything on Echo. This should have been the part where I realized what happened, but a few more hours would pass before that hit me. After a few hours of troubleshooting I remembered that I granted myself access to his hub as a different location on my account. Apparently, if you have 2 locations Alexa can only cont…

[Glen_King]

@Ernie_Sharp

My Father in Law and I both have ST installed, and use Alexa as a voice control. He needs to be able to .
(snip)
. Now I just have to figure out how to let him in the house. (The key fob presence tags don’t work for us)

If you have an android control tablet around, you can use Tasker plus a couple helpers called Sharptools and AutoNotification. Set up a google voice number, and have him call or text that number when he arrives. AutoNotification will intercept the number and prod Sharptools to deactivate the alarm.