Finally happy with SmartThings

Running the longer cat5 cable under the carpet along the edge. Once the carpet is played back down on top you never know it was ever there. I only pull it up at points behind the furniture. I’ve also run cat5 behind my base boards in the gap between my sheetrock and floor.


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I am envious. I used to have a decent experience with ST. Lately, my doors unlock in the middle of the night, rules don’t trigger, and the IDE makes me look stupid.

Dude, don’t be envious, just use the 4 steps above and presence will be solid. As far as rules not triggering… Time triggered rules don’t work well, but event triggered rules work consistently. So create an event triggered rule with time limiters…
Example from Rules Machine:

Basically the first time i toss or turn between 8:45 and 9:15 on a week day my lights turn on to wake me up… this fires every time. Setting it to just fire at 9:00am was not consistent. I can’t stress this enough… the more zwave and/or zigbee drives you through at SmartThings… the better it gets and rules machine just rocks…

Me I use my iPhone for get retuning home but not to automate leaving. That is a manual minimote in the car if for some reason my phone doesn’t trigger return and open the garage button 2 runs I’m back

I think my biggest concern so far has been the door unlocking. I’ve poured over the logs and no event seems to trigger it. It just unlocked. I’ve also had issues with intrusion detection firing even though there is no event at the contact sensor. I spent one night being woken every hour to the intrusion event. It’s one of the reasons I have a separate alarm system that’s “off the grid”.

Unless your lock is bad, or you’re using a crappy custom devicetype that doesn’t log events you lock should log something. It’s just a matter of where to look.

I have mostly hardwood floors so that would be a lot trickier. On this topic, I have been plagued with poor 2.4 ghz wifi in my house and have never been able to figure out why. My solution was to buy new ap’s that support 5 ghz and all of my remaining 2.4 ghz devices (Nest, Rachio, etc) would hopefully be in a happy place and that worked until I got the Ring doorbell last week and started seeing choppy audio and video. A lot of folks complained the Ring’s wifi implementation was poor and they had to buy an AP just to put in the area where the Ring doorbell is located. So last night I moved my Hue and ST hub’s into my bedroom away from my main wireless access point and near my other access point in the back of the house. Other than some zigbee troubleshooting (powering off and on) devices, so far ST still is acting solid and so far my Ring doorbell hasn’t had choppy audio or video. I also just moved my 2.4ghz wifi to channel 1 as my ST channel is 15 and Hue is 20.

Here is to hoping :slightly_smiling:

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I ran 1200 feet of cat6 through my 1961 house, so no problem either! :grinning:

Note: I do not recommend doing this.

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I’ll have to really dig in if it happens again. All I can say is that we woke up in the morning, the lock was open, and there were no other events in the app to suggest something triggered it.

The Android/IOS/Windows app is useless for troubleshooting. You gotta use the website.

I thought when I read this you somehow got the absolute pathetic excuse for the ST presence sensor to actually work. Alas I read further down on the thread you had to purchase the key fob thing. Note * It’s not that mine didn’t work, it’s that it was completely unreliable and because I used the ST presence to turn off/on Smart Home Monitor I had to stop using due to the constant false alarms it would generate because presence would not recognize I entered the geofence radius

In my mind this is completely unacceptable that we need to purchase another $30.00 sensor because the technology doesn’t work.

What am I missing here. Your ST hub needs to be plugged into your router. How far are you talking? Are you suggesting purchasing a super long ethernet cable. Can you elaborate more on this.

Edit: I should have kept reading the thread. I guess I need to buy a longer ethernet cable. How long can I go with out degrading signal strength.

100m or ~300 ft… you can go quite a long way on a single cable run. Support recommends about 6 ft of distance from your WIFI AP/Router, but the other side of the room is normally a safer bet.

Hi, I read your post and I have a couple of questions. Fyi, I’m an IT specializing in networking and telecom. (That’s just so you know where my questions are stemming from)

What kind of router is your main device?
What kind of internet connection do you use?
What are your internet speeds when tested by ookla?
What type of AP’s, are you using?

And lately, do you know this…

The typical AP I’d not a very good device for exceeding your range. In an effort to keep the price point less than a router, the AP has very poor band filtering. Because if this, the average AP cuts your signal speed in half. Ie; your 60 mbs signal is reduced to 30 mbs when connected through that device. This is not widely known, our realized as the average person never notices.

This is what I do and what I have in my home.

Main router is an Asus dual band as86 (I think). This is a multi antenna very powerful router. It sits as close to the physical center of the house as possible and on the second floor.

My AP is actually an old sysco single band router. I’ve sideload a firm ware on it to make it a fully customizable AP that disables the router capability. The device acts as a wireless AP that repeats at full power. It allows for wired and wireless connections to it and connects wirelessly to my router. This device was replaced by the main router.

This device sits on the second floor almost directly beneath my main router. I have my ST hub wired to this device.

This setup covers a 2400 sqft 2 story house. I have three teenagers with Xboxes, computers, phones, and tablets, plus my wireless tv’s and about 50 other things on my networks.

With everything going and streaming, nothing glitches, ever. Talking about speeds and streaming content.

Ok, to the point of this. One of your problems may be the AP devices you have in your setup.

There are a lot of factors that can degrade your between.

How old is your house?
What are the walls made of? Sheetrock, wood, plaster, all of the above?

How old is your router?
How old is your modem?

I upgrade my router every 3-4 years with a modem upgrade every 2 years.

The hardware is out of date and the speed differences is incredible.

Sorry fur the long read, but I might be able to give you some pointers to help improve things.

  1. My main router in my living room is an Asus RT-AC68P. I disabled the wireless on my Actiontec FIOS router as it didn’t support 5ghz. Until last night, I had my ST and Hue hubs plugged into them. (In addition to my Logitech Hub also which only runs on 2.4ghz). Since I’ve moved the ST and Hue Hubs, my Ring Doorbell video seems to be performing better.
  2. Verizon FIOS
  3. I will just discuss my ookla speeds on my 2.4ghz, (with my 5, I get 50/50 everywhere in the house just about). When I am outside in my living room or in my main area, I usually get 35-50 down/up. However, when I go into my bedroom, my iPhone automatically connects to my Moca Extender and I get poor speeds on 2.4ghz also. There is something about my bedroom area where 2.4ghz doesn’t perform well. Mind you, this is a brand new extension in the back of my old bedroom(which was also a problem). I even powered down both my ST and Hue hubs and I still get terrible signal.
  4. My access point in my bedroom is actually a MOCA extender( https://www.verizon.com/home/fios-accessories/fios-network-extender/) I LOVE THIS device. Reason being it doesn’t split up the bandwidth like a traditional access point and connects into my Coax. It is here where I moved my ST and Hue hubs last night. I also have a Logitech Harmony Hub here also.

More answers:

How old is your house? About 60 years old.
What are the walls made of? Sheetrock, wood, plaster, all of the above? Sheet Rock.

How old is your router? About a year.
How old is your modem? About 3.5 years.

I also have a Motorola Baby Monitor but I eliminated those as my issue a long time ago.

Awesome! Thank you for the response. Sounds like your equipment is good to go and you know what you’re doing.

We actually have almost the same router. Mine is the ac 68u. Yours has a 1ghz cpu and mine is 800 mhz

Based on what you’ve said, I would look at environmental. The older house could be the problem.

Yes, I believe it’s something environmental, but I’m hoping by spitting up some of my hubs into my bedroom, it will relieve the issues I had with my Ring doorbell. The amount of wireless stuff I have in this house is bound to cause all sorts of traffic I can’t see :slightly_smiling:

I did put my ST hub downstairs on my AP and my hue hub is upstairs on the router. I don’t think they interfere with each other.

Here’s a thought, I have my cable box and Mr DVD player stacked in the nook beneath my tv. The AP is on one side and the ST hub is on the other. So, there is a small stack of metal between the two.

Would it be possible to our something metal between yours?

Also, I used to live in a house that had rebar in the brick walls ( 80’s Florida hurricane idea). That signal sucked in that house.

I used metal coat games and aluminum foil and made my antennas directional. Couldn’t hurt to focus all of the signal into the home our into the direction you are having trouble.

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One must keep in mind that zigbee channel is not the same as wifi channel. See more here

Funny you mentioned your set up. I spent most of this week redesigning my whole network. I haven’t checked channel interference since last summer, and boy was I surprised to discover that my next door neighbor is an HA addict ( which explains why I was seeing unknown devices popping up occasionally), plus my other neighbor is a true networking freak with two powerful routers and three extenders. No wonder I was having so many issues. I ended up getting a secondary router (rt 68u) and a Netgear ac1200 extender for my second floor. I kept my quantum fios as primary with wifi enabled and the asus as secondary. Had to change all of my channels because of course, they were on the most congested frequency. I think after this weekend, I will have a much stronger network. I can tell already that the lag on my hue bulbs is really unnoticeable now.

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