Multi location SmartThings/Hue/Alexa Integration

Hi! Recently bought a SmartThings hub to use with a Schlage Z wave lock at my business. I added this to the already existing network consisting of a Hue bridge, 20 bulbs, Logitech Harmony hub, Apple TV w/homekit, and an Echo dot. Have a very similar setup at home (25 bulbs, hue bridge, dot, Apple TV, harmony hub) and was thinking of adding a ST/Schlage setup (the A TV homekit is hardly reliable when controlling hue bulbs, wouldn’t trust it with the Sense lock) there as well. What I am trying to figure out is what is the best way to integrate the SmartThings/Hue lights and other commands through the Dot, as well general integration. I use IFTTT too.

I’d really like to centrally manage both locations, have Alexa commands that can trigger chain reactions of triggers (I.E. “Watch a movie” runs commands to set all 20+ lights to a scene, and has the Harmony run it’s chain for the projector/receiver/etc…) plus set up some routines where all the lights turn off at a certain time, the doors locks, the sensors alarm during certain hours etc…

After updating the Alexa page with new devices (to add the Z wave lock) it duplicated everything from their respective sources, listing all of lights as both “connected via hue” and “SmartThings device (dimmable ,color, turnable white)” and all of the Harmony activities as their regular versions and SmartThings. This has caused none of the commands to work due to it stating multiple devices of the same name, and looping due to the redundancy.

Would it be best to keep the ST versions of each on the Alexa account? Or should the native hubs for each device be the controller? It’s all on the same Lan switch. I read that only one Hue bridge can be paired to an Alexa account, can multiple ST hubs be paired to the same one?

If not that, would it just be best to make two separate accounts on Alexa/ST/Hue/Harmony and mirror the setup process on both systems? Ideally would like to avoid that if possible. Would I at least be able to link the other SmartThings account/hub to one of the others and switch between them?

End goals would be two locations having similar full automation with easy management after initial setup.

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(I’ve moved this to Projects so you can get individualized responses based on your own setup and preferences.)

I’m sure that’s been an adventure! At present, as you suspected, each hub needs to have its own separate smartthings account and it’s own separate Amazon account or things just get muddled. Smart things has said that in the future they hope to be able to allow us to have multiple locations with multiple echoes/dots, but you can’t do it right now. You can have multiple echoes/dots at one location, no problem. Or you can manage to separate smartthings hub’s through onesmart things account. But you can’t separately assign an echo to the hub and if you do the device list get mixed and you get very unpredictable results.

So for now, just setting them each up as two independent accounts will work best.

As far as the duplicate devices for one account, different people handle that differently. Personally, I connect any devices to Alexa through their own native integration. So I do not tell smartthings to add all devices to echo. Instead, I connect the hue bridge to echo through the Hue/Alexa integration, and I individually pick the devices on my SmartThings account that I want to connect echo through the SmartThings/Alexa integration, and I leave the hue bulbs off of the SmartThings list. I just find it works better for me that way. But there are people who prefer to authorize as many things , as possible through their smartthings account and so then they have to delete the Hue copies of their bulbs. You can do it either way, whichever seems best to you.

You can definitely trigger a chain of events using just the official features, but only for one hub at a time.

Echosistant is a custom project developed by some community members, including @bamarayne , which lets you do a lot of things with Alexa that you can’t do just with the native features. For example, you could ask it if a door is unlocked. Setup is a fairly complicated, although there are a lot of people who will be able to help you. It’s piggybacking off of the SmartThings implementation, so I don’t think it solves the two location issue. It just gives you a bunch of additional features.

There’s another similar project called AskAlexa. Both are good, they just offer somewhat different capabilities. But again, more set up work.