I ran into this video looking for tools to help me troubleshoot Zwave issues. The video shows how EASILY HomeSeer users can upgrade from Zwave to Zwave Plus which is essentially nearly as changing hubs in our case. As shown in the hub, they can backup their Zwave configuration and restore it when the new stick is inserted. Also, the video shows their equivalent of “Network Repair” which provides way more information such as neighboring devices!! In the absence of a topographic map, this would be the next best thing! And to make me even more jealous it talked about “network wide inclusion” saying you could include devices without needing to get close to the hub. As far as I know, ST still requires some devices to be close which in the case of locks, or wired in devices, it is a royal pain.
HomeSeer also has a Z stick that allows users to update many different 3rd party zwave devices. It doesn’t seem to be tied to the “hub” firmware so they enjoy much better flexibility in keeping the devices up-to-date. Nowadays this is critical especially if you worry about security.
I am not ready to jump ship but it makes me wonder why ST is so far behind compared to HomeSeer which appears to be a much smaller operation with a very old looking and crude interface … I originally purchased their hub before I moved to ST but dropped it shortly after as it was highly unpolished.
Migrating from one zwave Controller to another zwave Controller is completely different from migrating from one zigbee coordinator to another. Zwave has the concept of “controller shift” and “controller replicate” – – zigbee Home Automation doesn’t have anything similar.
SmartThings is a multiprotocol platform. It has to be able to handle both kinds of devices. Homeseer does not support zigbee devices, so it doesn’t have these issues.
That doesn’t mean it’s impossible. Wink has done a very good job of providing a migration tool from their hub one to their hub two, and it does handle both Z wave and zigbee devices. So that’s the one we should be asking questions about.
But it’s just not fair to compare SmartThings, which is a multiprotocol platform, to a Z wave to zwave migration. And it certainly doesn’t imply that Homeseer is in any way advanced beyond a multiprotocol platform: they made things simpler for themselves by not offering zigbee to begin.
If a smaller outfit as HomeSeer can offer what appears to be the equivalent of migrating from one Zwave controller to another, then I’d expect ST to fill that gap as well especially when it is so complicated and time consuming to tear down and build back up all the devices and automations on a new hub.
You are correct in pointing out that this would only fix half of the issue but something is better than nothing. The vast majority of my devices are Zwave so this feature would greatly simplify the operation leaving me with a much smaller number of devices to deal with. Also, I am frustrated by the fact they do not expose more in depth information on the mesh networks, such as topographic maps, routing tables, etc. The same video shows that during a network repair HomeSeer shows the neighboring devices which is very useful information. Every time we have an issue with a device misbehaving we are mostly operating blind guessing what other devices might be involved.
I am not bashing ST, and I am not planning on abandoning the platform, but it is good to hope (and promote) for a better future!
