I’m still surprised that they’re marketing the Smart Home Monitor as being equivalent to a commercial security system, even if it’s “coming soon”
Like you, I have a monitored service that I pay a monthly fee for, and I really don’t mind because it’s one of those “mission critical” services that you don’t use as much, but there can be no doubt that it will work when you need it. I have 24 zones, PIR, smoke/CO2 sensors, cellular radio and internet available, and it’s worth every penny.
By comparison, I know that ST as a platform continues to have its reliability issues, so while I’m monitoring presence and have the garage doors and locks tied in, I wouldn’t even consider automating those things, because I know that it only has to fail one time to make a terrible impression.
I’m hoping that they sort out the issues, as insurmountable as they seem considering the local/remote processing strategy that they seem to be tied into. Even if I don’t switch over to ST as an alarm provider at least we can all benefit from the increased reliability and stability of the platform.
I recently decided to go the CT100 route for my thermostat
using rboy’s great 5-2 thermo app, the first mission critical device
I’ve deployed in my house. It worked splendid for about a month and now
it too has fallen victim to the plague of failed triggers. I thought
maybe I should upgrade to the v2 hub with it’s local controls, opposed
to the crazy-azz cloud round-trip required on the v1 for scheduled
triggers but I’ve seen many posts in here about its short-comings as
well.
So how can anyone in their right mind trust their security, door-locks, etc. to the ST platform?
Well, they don’t. As mentioned elsewhere in the thread, reliable systems can be had. But they are expensive. I didn’t have one, so I’m a happy ST customer. I now have at least the chance of being notified of a break-in or water leak. But I would never trust ST with control over a door or thermostat.
One way I’ve been trying to overcome some of this, is via redundancy and double-checks. e.g. TWO triggers to cause an alarm e.g. ST alerts that my front door opened while I was away at work. ISSUE!!! So, I check my Netatmo Welcome camera, and I can see that the door never
opened, and I indeed confirm it via the video replay. (false alarm.)
I do the same thing, albeit just with the SM system. Right behind my door sensor is a motion sensor. So far (knock on wood!) a false alarm in one is not associated with a false alarm in the other. And I have motion sensors in all my rooms. If someone broke a window to get in and avoided the door sensor, I expect they would visit more than one room.
[quote=“WTSL, post:20, topic:29498, full:true”]
SMARTTHINGS IS FRUSTRATING THE HELL OUT OF ME!
I was hoping the update, SmartThings emailed me about, would help address the issue of inconsistent performance. From day-to-day, I never know what lights will go on or off and when they may do so. It’s like lighting Russian roulette. Of course, after I contacted them, I was informed the update had nothing to do with my hub.[/quote]
What trouble shooting have you done so far? I’m curious about things like this because I, personally, have never experienced stuff like this. I have had the occasional instance where a scheduled task doesn’t fire or a SmartApp that is supposed to run doesn’t. These are pretty few and far between for me which I understand isn’t the case for everyone, but I’ve never experienced stuff just randomly turning on.
Did you really have something go on without you knowing it would? This is rare, and usually attributable to either slow cloud processing (press a button, many seconds later it comes on) or misbehaving smartapps. Any chance either one of these is true for your specific case? Just curious. My problems have only ever been things not happening, and you can tell why in the design.
There’s more to it than that. I have multiple instances of devices randomly coming on, confirmed by smartthings support review of their server logs.
At my house it’s really obvious, because I’m home almost all the time, I’m generally in one of two rooms, and I can see/hear a lot of my devices. And when you’re using it for a/v control it’s obvious when the TV changes channels on its own.
And again, SmartThings has had engineers assigned looking into this for over a month. It all started with the platform update just before Halloween. Never had these issues before.
No one knows for sure, but it really does look like it’s an issue of synchronization between the new local processing and the cloud account.
I have one set of lights that is sent a set level 99 followed by a set level zero every morning at sunrise even though there’s no actuating Smartapp. That’s the only one that has a specific time pattern.
I have a Z wave lock that unlocks randomly. You can see it in the log entries. No actuating event. But a SmartThings command is being sent.
Why me and not somebody else? No idea, although I do live in the geographic area that was most heavily affected by the sunset failures in the spring. It may just be musical chairs.
But however many data points you see in the forum posts, support has at least 10 times as many. And devices randomly coming on for some people is a known issue they’re looking at.
It’s almost always something NOT happening. Regarding troubleshooting, frankly I’m not sure how to go about it. And, it varies so much it’s hard to know what to go after.
Also, I’ve invested significantly is this technology/platform. I just want it to reliably work. It may not be reality but let the SmartThings guys come over and troubleshoot! My house is not 6,000 square feet, most of my devices are within 40 to 50 feet of the hub and this is supposed to be a mesh network for goodness sakes. Further, I don’t think this is a local issue but a system problem. Relying on the Internet and ST servers to carry out commands for thousands of users is likely the culprit.
Thanks for sharing that JD. I always assumed that when someone says something came on randomly, that it must be some kind of delay, or an unexpected SmartApp effect and they just didn’t realize it / couldn’t figure it out. Seeing that this problem is effecting you tells me there really is a problem.
Yes, it’s a real problem. And it also affects Virtual switches, so it’s not just the local network.
Sometimes messages are lost, sometimes messages are delayed, and sometimes messages are duplicated.
One member posted log screenshots of a mystery device in the IDE called “dining room sensor” that showed up in their account one day, and they don’t even have a dining room.
This may all reflect multiple issues, not necessarily just one. I think I have six open support tickets right now. Some of them may be related to the others, but some of them are probably independent.
I suspect the sunrise one has to do with changes they’ve been making with how set level is handled for GE link bulbs, for example, rather than anything to do with the presence sensor that always shows present.
But the presence sensor issue might have to do with some of the other phantom on events, I don’t know.
I know @slagle offered to take a look at your account, were you able to connect? I think that sort of visibility on your issues (which are spontaneous on, I consider MUCH worse) is well worth the look.
Yeah I’m on a similar boat… the convenience features are great, and I will continue to rely on ST for the foreseeable future – so it can let me know when the washer machine is done or whatever the case, but while I have the whole thing connected to my door locks / garage door and thermostat so I can see their state, it’s going to be a while before I have it *control *them.
The day I see a spontaneous door open / unlock is the day that those devices will become unavailable to ST.
[quote=“JDRoberts, post:25, topic:29498, full:true”]
There’s more to it than that. I have multiple instances of devices randomly coming on, confirmed by smartthings support review of their server logs.
At my house it’s really obvious, because I’m home almost all the time, I’m generally in one of two rooms, and I can see/hear a lot of my devices. And when you’re using it for a/v control it’s obvious when the TV changes channels on its own. [/quote]
Wow that’s… that’s not good. Especially this part:
I guess I’ll count myself among the lucky that this hasn’t ever happened too. I mean, it’s one thing when stuff just does happen. That’s really more of an annoyance (at least to me… different use case for different people) because it’s automation that isn’t automating.
But the coming on randomly or unlocking randomly… that’s more than just an annoyance even to one like me who has a relatively high tolerance for the bleeding edge of technology.
I think you’re probably right. However, it’s worth doing a little troubleshooting to make sure that there isn’t setting on your end (or rather, in your account) that isn’t cause part of the problems. Here’s the steps I do to start trouble shooting a problem:
1.) Make sure the device is still seen by the hub. Open the mobile app and toggle the switch on/off and make sure it’s turning on or off… or if it’s a sensor, open and close it and make sure the mobile see the change in state. It’s not unheard of at all for devices to lose their connection with the hub. It shouldn’t happen, but it does. Sometimes it’s a ST issue, sometimes it’s a issue/problem with the device itself.
Check with SmartApp are trying to control this device. In the mobile app, tap on the name of the device to open up the details on that device itself. Then tap “SmartApps” on the top right side. This will list all the apps that are tied to this device. Make sure you don’t have two apps that might be fighting each other. Check also that any apps that are schedule to run at a specific time or condition are set to use the right modes (if any).
While we’re in the detail view of the device, check the “Recently” tap to get a log of what’s been happening with this device. This is another good area to see if there are conflicting or strange events happening.
These are some of the first areas I look when trying to figure out why something isn’t happening the way I expect it too. You may already have done some of this and I hope I’m not insulting your intelligence or anything, just not familiar with how much you do or don’t know about this stuff yet.
This is one of the reasons that I use Kwikset’s internal autolock feature. The lock will automatically lock itself after 30 seconds no matter how it’s opened… key, code, or z-wave signal. That feature is completely independent of any network it’s on.
Not that terrible high traffic. A few times in and out a day at most really.
We did have to modify how we operated a slight bit.
For example, in the old ‘analog world’ if I went outside to take out the trash or something previously I’d just unlock my door, walk to the garage, dump the trash, then go back in through the door, and re-lock.
In the new ‘digital world’ if I do this, there’s a decent chance the door will lock automatically before I get back. So instead I just don’t shut the door all the way. Just pull it mostly closed.
Hi, ChrisB! Thanks for the suggestions. You’re not insulting my intelligence- I appreciate your time trying to help. I’m going to investigate further. One very wierd thing though… my devices respond when I’m using “Things” but not “Shortcuts”. Every day, SmartThings seems to get a little funkier. Again, thank you.
I have concerns, I don’t think shortcuts exist anymore. I thought that went out the door with the V2 hub and app updates. Are you using an older version of the app?
