I can’t be the only one that has had nothing but problems with this wretched device. I got it to do basically a few things. Nothing crazy.
I have a v1 hub, probably about 2 years old now
-Monitor water level in my sump put
-Monitor smoke/co detectors
-Turn outside lights on and off
-control and monitor status of door lock
Of those things
the water sensor lost its mind, will randomly decide that its wet when it is not. I’ve since removed the batteries, its useless, this is obviously not STs issue. But still annoying
-As far as I can tell the smoke/co works as they should
-The lights, oh god the lights. I don’t think its too much to ask that they turn on when it gets dark and turns off when its not. I mean the $13 dusk to dawn light I have out back manages that every night. They can’t do that. That app simply won’t work. So set times it is. Well that works mayyyyyyybe 30% of the time and it NEVER turns them off when It should.
-Door lock, it works most of the time.
As to the lights, could it be that I have a device I only use around christmas to control the christmas lights? and its unplugged the rest of the year?
Is there a solution to any of this? I’m about to rip most of it out and sell it for whatever pennies I can get. I feel totally ripped off by this.
For what it’s worth, here’s my (overly-long) take on things.
I started using SmartThings two years ago, and have about 15 devices. The first year was hell. Nothing worked consistently and everyday was an exercise in buyer’s remorse. I was particularly upset that, in my initial enthusiasm, I had encourage people to go out and buy what had basically become junk. SmartThings got a lot of heat, their rating on Amazon plummeted, and this forum lit up with unhappy customers. About 6 months ago it seems as if ST got real and started shoring up the infrastructure (could have been Samsung’s $$$ or the backlash, who knows). They broke a lot of things as they tried to fix things but for now, at least for me, things have gotten considerably better. Not perfect, but much, much better. For some reason, ST thought sunset was at 4:00 PM a few days last week and everything came on early. But they did at least come on. Tonight things are back to normal and everything turned on at the proper time. I have a GE Link bulb that comes on randomly all the time but that is just a minor annoyance and I suspect it’s GE, not ST’s at fault.
My lesson from all of this is to NEVER use ST for anything critical. I will never have a ST-controlled door lock. I would never use ST to turn on an appliance that could cause a fire.
I get your frustration. I’ve been there myself. Hopefully the ST infrastructure and apps will continue to improve. Or something a little more solid will hit the market. But for now, I think this is as good as it gets (and with the exception of the occasional setback (e.g., Device Health), things do seem to be getting better). I’d love to hear suggestions for another product that is as flexible and that supports custom automation to the extent ST does, but I don’t think there is one that’s appropriate for someone who’s not terribly technical and not willing to write code.
ST is also to be commended for providing this forum. It’s an invaluable resource and one where ST gets some serious s–t sometimes.
Yeah, I’m really glad I never went all in on it. And at least the smoke/CO detectors can be used without the hub.
Just this morning, outside lights turned on, and then failed to turn off. Last night they failed to do either. They last worked with any regularity last December.
A guy I work with claims to have a v2 hub that works flawlessly, but I spent $100ish on this one, I shouldn’t have to pay to upgrade to get it to work as advertised.
Its telling that when I last searched for this issue on these forums the “accepted solution” was to by a Wink hub.
The door lock is a nice thing to have, for if anything monitoring it. But I’ll be honest the lacking security in IoT devices makes me nervous about having it still
I just went through and removed my schedules for the lights, again. I’ll try the sunset/sunrise settings, again. I don’t have much faith in it though.
What would be ideal for me would be to garbage all this stuff and just setup and maintain my own controller so I’m not relying on a fantastically unreliable cloud service.
bamarayne
(Jason "The Enabler" as deemed so by @Smart)
4
So, after all of the money and time that you’ve put into your system, you’re unwilling to spend $75.00 and get a new V2 hub? They are on sale at home depot right now.
I’m just thinking, what’s an hour of your time worth? Plus the frustration factor…
Just sayin, instead of complaining in misery, why not just fix it?
You do not have many devices at all and it looks like your devices should work with another hub (brand). I am over 200 devices with not much fuss…(I am on V2)
Things break every once in a while and sometime the cloud is slow or amazon goes down, which we have 8 echo/dots and use voice control heavily.
This biggest thing for me was leaving the stock apps alone and using CoRE to set my rules. Once I did this, most of my issues went away as I was able to see things in real time in the Dash Board which helped me troubleshoot various issues that I was having.
Maybe try a Pi and OpenHAB? That way, its all local.
Because I shouldn’t have to spend nearly as much as I paid for the thing to buy a entirely new one just so I can have features such as “working”. Then what happens when v3 is out and v2 ones work poorly, buy another! I’ll pull it all out and sell it before I do that.
I mean, are the v1 hubs that bad?
As it stands, I currently have:
2 smoke detectors
one light switch
one door lock
one smart outlet - only used for christmas lights though so its currently unplugged.
I was looking into going WAY further with it all, but decided not to once things got so unreliable.
I’ve looked into the Pi/OpenHAB idea before, and maybe I need to do it again. But TBH If I pull this out, I’ll likely take a break from this sort of thing till the technology matures some more.
Have you tried CoRE or webCoRE? If you are looking for a solution then there it is. If you are looking to vent your frustrations then I understand and emphasize with you, but that’s not going to help your setup work as it should.
The reason I am so active on these forums is because I was having the same issues…Now, as I said before, I have a pretty solid setup that I am constantly expanding. If it breaks completely, I, as you are now, do not know if I’ll recommit to this platform.
Oh, I’d love nothing more then for it to work right.
I just don’t know where to begin. I feel as though I’m at the mercy of the cloud service. I don’t have much local control as far as I can tell, I hook it up, and then let the cloud do the rest.
Unless it involves spending more money on a v2 hub. I mean my v1 hub worked pretty good for awhile, now it does not. I haven’t changed anything.
V1 hub user here still and really have not such issues. I have a water sensor rigged from a door contact that once in a while will scream WET but that’s about it. I feel the same pains as any v2 user and I don’t think I’m missing out on any v2 features at the moment.
I however am digging myself a deeper hole each time I add a new device to my v1 network… argh!
My experience has been similar – that things seem to be getting more reliable over time. But, I still don’t trust it for anything critical and I am constantly checking to make sure things are happening as they should. (The good news is that it’s usually working pretty well.)
Just recently started switching things over to CoRE, and I’ve just discovered webCoRE in this thread, and, though there’s a learning curve, I have found CoRE to be much more reliable than regular SmartApps.