I have 3 houses, one for almost permanent residence and 2 for temporary residence, on vacation or weekends.
I have connected devices and Internet access in all of them and I intend to implement some automation in all of them also.
I currently only have one Aeotec Smart Home Hub in the one where I live permanently, but I concluded that I have more connection and automation needs in the houses where I only live occasionally.
Should I buy another Hub to place in one of them and move the Hub I already have to the other?
The version of Smart Things that Iâm using seems to assume a Hub for each house. Is this so?
If you have more than one Hub, do they recognize each other? Will it be possible to define an automation interacting with a sensor physically connected to another Hub?
If possible, I would like to have a general idea of the architecture that I should implement to allow future development of the solution.
You only need a smartthings/Aeotec hub if you are going to use Z wave, zigbee, or matter devices. If all of your integrations are cloud to cloud, then no hub is required. For example, you might have a Samsung smart television, a ring doorbell, Meross or TP Link Wi-Fi light switches and smart plugs, a hue bridge, Arlo cameras, Shelly Wi-Fi sensors, and you wouldnât need a hub at all. All of the devices would talk to your smartthings account through the smartthings cloud via the Internet, so it doesnât matter if theyâre in the same physical building or not.
If youâre going to have zwave or Zigbee or matter devices, then you need a hub in each physical home where you want to use those devices. But depending on exactly how you set up your account you could have, for example, a window sensor at House A trigger a blinking light at House B, provided, of course, that you have an active Internet connection at both homes.
So from that aspect, the architecture is very flexible.
Where people tend to run into problems is with the voice assistants like Amazon Alexa or Google assistant. Smartthings only offers integrations with these at the account level, which means a voice assistant in any of your homes can control the devices in any of your other homes if they are all on the same account. That can lead to a lot of issues where you say âall lights offâ and suddenly lights in a completely different building are going dark.
There are multiple threads in the forum where people try to address this issue, but there just isnât a good way under the current architecture. If itâs the same smart things account, itâs pretty likely that a Voice assistant in any of your homes will have access to the devices in your other homes, so thatâs just something to be aware of.
And to answer one specific question: your hubs donât communicate directly with each other. Each communicates with the cloud account so thatâs how information can get passed between them.
I use the Samsung Bixby Voice Assistant on my Galaxy phone and SSung TV to control all my SThings implementations. So, I think, if the phone or TV is Samsung, the Bixby VA can also be an option. It is not robust, but it is less complicated than Alexa or GAsst. Bixby only âlistensâ from a phone or active TV, there are no other speaker based accesses to Bixby.
