My thoughts summed up

I use the Danfoss Z-Wave TRVs with my Nest heating control - they are seen in Smarthings as a Z-Wave thermostat. I am still looking for an app that can link all of them together so they can be controlled as one.

You complain about SmartThings launching too soon in the UK.
But the problem from where I stand is that 2 years after being launched in the US, their platform is still highly unstable there, also in a kind of “perpetual beta”.

I do like their “conceptual” architecture : in theory a cloud based architecture is nice… when it works.
The problem is that the ST “works”… most of the time : when the ST platform breaks down, or when it is reorganized (“enhanced” or “upgraded” would be too strong words :wink: ), Smart Apps which were before running break down, without any warning or error message.
When I discovered the problem on my first Smart App, I created a 2nd Smart App whose sole purpose was to check the first one was still alive. Guess what : the 2nd “watchdog” Smart App would break down even more often that the first one did !!

ST Support does what it can, but when the problem is not something you did wrong but a bug in the ST platform itself, they are helpless.
I took pain and time to document a dozen of bugs, with screen copies, code example, etc… ST support forwarded those to the development team and guess what : 4 times out of 5, nothing happened, the bug was never corrected.
The worst offender seems to be the mobile SmartThings Application (I use iOS), which from my point of view gets worse and worse with every update. At least at the beginning it was buggy but pretty; now it does not seem able to display a full line of Activity log without truncating it !

Oh, BTW, I am not in the US nor in the UK : I am in France, and started with a US Hub and US Z-wave sensors more than 1 year ago. I had to develop my own Device Handler in Groovy to support the Fibaro FGK-101 Temperature Sensor, which was not supported then by the ST platform.
After investing about $2000 and spending months of development and testing effort, it more or less works. What is definitely aggravating is that the stability and reliability of the ST platform is progressing soooo sloooowly that you get the impression it will not be in a stable enough state before 5 more years… if they are still alive by then.

The dilemma ST had, even before they were bought by Samsung (BTW, not a good thing unless you are a Corean), is that they have to move faster than their competition… or die. And along that path, any hope for “4 sigma” reliability gets deep sixed.
From ST management point of view, this is definitely a successful strategy : less than 2 years after their kick-starter project started shipping, they made a pile of money selling to Samsung… who by then needed them to come to this emerging HA market not too late.
From the customer point of view, the benefits of using an advanced technology to do “smart things” is definitely marred by the unreliability of the whole set up : yes, it works… most of the time.
But if you want to do anything remotely close to “mission critical” functions, just forget ST : you may get 95% or 98% reliability, but the remaining 2% of bugs and breakdowns will drive you crazy.
Anyway, the question is : is there TODAY on the market something as powerful AND much more reliable than ST ?
If somebody thinks he has found it, he probably is not on this forum anymore, but I would still be VERY interested by his “better” solution…

The bottom-line is that for the near future, either you don’t go in Home Automation at all, or you consider it as a hobby, invest in it no more than what you would in a hobby, and accept the occasional (but too frequent) quirky behavior and breakdowns.
Apple HomeKit may offer a higher quality solution sometimes in the future (remember what passed for a “smart phone” before the first iPhone ?), but as it stands today it is even more than ST “a work in progress”.

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The generic consensus is you can’t currently get “as powerful” and “much more reliable”… Especially without the third factor: “similarly priced”.

There are a dozen (?) new competitors coming to the market over the next year or two… Some already crowdfunded (most with ludicrous claims and far too optimistic timelines), and others in stealth. Each one’s definition of “powerful”, “open”, “reliable”, “affordable”, etc., will differ and each will have a challenge to succeed.

Huge numbers of people are betting on HomeKit without any evidence. Personally, I speculate that Google/Nest will be formidable.

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Hi I am another Insiders tester who has had the kit for about a week and I am left severely underwhelmed.
OAuth is a huge miss as I couldn’t even create an account for the forums trying to link it to my Google+ account.
The only 2 things I can connect it to is my Hue lights which I have working via IFTT anyway and my Sonos Speakers, unbelievably it doesn’t support Nest out of the box.

For me to make the system work well enough I need another motion detector, another door sensor and a camera and ideally a siren/strobe which even if I get the kit I already have at a discount I am probably into £350 to£400 which puts it into professional alartm system territory.
As I cannot get it to do what I would like it to it is working as a mini security kit.
As others have said Samsung needs to remember that Smartthings carries the Samsung name and customers expect a level that’s not close to be being met.

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THIS!!!

…is the reason those complaining about how awful ST is are still here…haven’t left…waiting on the HA world to change overnight so it suits their use case and wallet at the same time.

I hear you…I was once guilty too.

…as a girlfriend once told me when I was bitching about why 2 products from 2 different companies (and it was as like a wakeup call)…some of us “appear to have some serious privileged people problems”.

Accept it and patiently move forward is my attitude.

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Oooooohhh woe is me with my first world problems… Damnit! Now my latte is cool…

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I agree with your statement of people complaining - yet, they are still here. While the ST pool has numerous issues - many of us are still waiting. I got ST just because I want a system I can use and not spend countless hours writing code to make it work. I used to enjoy the time writing code, not any more. Is it flakey - yes. Can I live without it having a rules engine so I can do stuff without writing code - yes. Will I jump the moment someone has something better - yes.

The HA market for the DIY’er crowd has been a lesson in frustration for those who started in the X10 days.

Until then, I will get by without things working as planned. I have lived here for decades and will hold out for the next big thing. But, I won’t buy the new hub and as attractive as those Zigbee thermostats are at a $60 price point, I won’t buy. I’ll limit my expenditures to things I believe will work with whatever that “next big thing” is by sticking with things that work with most of the systems out there today.

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I’m with you here. It’s a double edged sword in that someone has to be the guinea pig yet no one wants the headaches.

The local processing for the smart lights app is the only thing I would gain vs. who knows for sure what I could possibly lose that’s just fine now?

If I was unhappy with it as some seem to be I’d just sell my junk or count my loses and move on.

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The only reason I still have it is I haven’t had time to dig out the receipt. I don’t appreciate unwittingly buying beta software… Which is why I’m “bitching” about it. End of the day, I buy Samsung hardware because I trust the brand and the level of polish on the UI software… Smart things has let them down dramatically.

As for the implication that buying this for the price its at we should have accepted pitfalls, that’s absolute tosh. For what’s not much more advanced than a £50 raspberry pi with a couple of different protocol wireless adaptors, you could argue that it’s a rip off.

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Well… that price doesn’t account for the tremendous costs involved in running the SmartCloud and the entire SmartThings operations (tech support, blah blah…).

However, you’re still quite correct: Price is no excuse. The popular term these days is MVP – “Minimum Viable Product”; and it sometimes gives brilliant results. More commonly you get bug filled releases that are absolutely equivalent to Beta tests or worse. The purpose of MVP is not to earn a profit … it is to ask the market (consumers) to refine your product and have the customers pay for the privilege of doing so.

MVP does not imply that the price has to be an ongoing net loss, nor that the product should be unusable – that would not be “Viable”. Yet I would much rather have “Minimum Reliable Product”, even if that means double or triple the price. Not 10x the price – no way, and unnecessary for a “minimum” for some reasonable definition of “reliable” Home Automation.

Regardless, SmartThings is still in “startup mode” (I don’t know for how much longer). And that means they lean heavily towards the MVP model. Too much so, I think. I was hoping Hub V2 would be double or triple the price of Hub V1. Not because I like spending too much money – but because I felt that with the extra revenue and slightly slower customer growth, they could focus on more stable, less rushed releases and more resources for platform reliability. Hub V2 was clearly released in MVP mode. The market demanded an upgrade to Hub V1, and SmartThings fully admits they released Hub V2 (and App V2) with known shortfalls, bugs, and unresolved decisions. Fits MVP definition perfectly.

So as we speculate about what competitors will enter the market – I can’t be too optimistic, unfortunately, because most will also be using MVP tactics to varying degrees, especially if they are innovative startups (Oomi Home?).

Again, I express my optimism in Google Nest (Alphabet Nest?) in context here – at least for reliability – because they (a) have tremendous resources, and (b) are clearly not rushing into the marketing despite having those resources – they are acting much less like a startup than SmartThings.

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It is what it is.

Too busy to dig up a receipt?..you could have done so in the time it took to type that :wink:

Price may not be an excuse for some. For me my expectations are price based…always have been…always will be.

Until strong competition challenges ST in the market I see them going with the strategy that got them this far.

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@BristolBaz
Have you had any luck getting these to work? I have Nest and really want to make it work like the Evohome - which essentially could be done using these but also allow more functionality than simple timers (presence, temperature etc.)

@BristolBaz
Have you had any luck getting these to work? I have Nest and really want to make it work like the Evohome - which essentially could be done using these but also allow more functionality than simple timers (presence, temperature etc.)

Yes, they do work but I am having major battery issues because smarthings keeps polling the TRVs every few seconds. I use in conjunction with the Master-Slave thermostats app and whenever I adjust my Nest thermostat it automatically adjusts all of the room TRVs so the temperature is almost constant across rooms.

But I need to find out how to stop ST polling so often. I am using a modified version of the z-wave thermostat.

Interesting. What kind of battery life do you get? Ideally I guess the best scenario would be ST not polling them, simply sending a command to change temperature.

I was thinking of using them combined with door sensors - door opens, trv opens to match current temperature - if the room temperature is less than target temperature, increase nest temp until temp reached - then reduce nest temp to “normal”.

Not sure if that is even possible

Please - go to Samsung UK website - and post reviews there. That might get the ball rolling if it is littered with bad reviews. I have done so today - and I do not know if they will approve and publish it.

And they advertise in the UK - 100’s of supported devices… BULL - there are 56 on the list where a big portion is either NOT fully implemented (so only has a " stub " and not all config options - or are " coming soon "

And the whole thing about repairing when something goes wrong - simple does not work - many of my relays are supposed to go IN the walls or behind sockets. Who the Hxxx will open them up to repair a sensor again.

Unfortunately the Starter Kit, Hub, and each Thing (sensors and plug…) have their own set of Reviews, so it is hard to get a consolidated impression, good or bad.

Amazon has a larger collection of reviews which are run through their weighting algorithm, and SmartThings’s has staff actively responding to negative ones.

Seriously, though, the product needs several professional in-depth critiques. We have an organization called “Consumer Reports” that is funded mostly by its readers; they don’t sell advertising. Their reviews are excellent in some categories, a little weak in others, depending on how technical the product is. Yet they would be taking a “consumer” perspective – or at least their journalistic professional advocacy for consumers.

Smart Home is still too difficult to define and decide on comparable products and features, though; which the Community knows really influences the decision process.