Need Advice - Second Hub for Same Physical Location

Devices & Integrations
1

Long story short, I’ve well surpassed the limit of devices ST allows (to be used in SmartApps), they have no plans to fix it.

My main hub is a Gen2 hub. I just picked up a new Gen3 one. Not the mesh network set, just the hub.

Should I add it in the ST app (new app, old one doesn’t seem to be able to do this) to the same (virtual) location?

Should I add a new virtual location and then add the hub to that?

When I do this, will I still be able to use the ST Classic app? Are devices listed together or do I need to switch locations?

2

They’ve changed the advice on this since the new V3 app firstcame out, and you can now find inconsistent recommendations in different places.

First, I’m not sure what you mean by “virtual location.“ in the new app, A Location is just a location. Whether it has a hub or not, and whether it’s at the same street address as another location or not.

It’s very important to understand that there’s a huge change in going from The V2 classic app to the V3 app. Because the new app folds in multiple Samsung product lines, including the smart televisions, smart vacuum cleaners, and smart appliances. So they no longer assume that a location has a hub or that the person Is ever going to get a hub. Maybe they just have the Samsung powerbot vacuum. Maybe they have a $6000 Samsung television, a sound bar, and some LIFX lightbulbs.

So you begin by creating the location. Then you can add a hub to it If you want.

(If you start by adding a hub, then the system automatically creates a “home“ location for you. )

Technically, it is possible to add more than one hub to the same location with the V3 app and originally they had some supportbase articles explaining that even though they were in the same location, Each hub could only control its own devices.

However A few months after release, they decided that it was a bad idea to have two hubs in one location and it can cause technical problems. So the supportbase article was edited to add the following phrase at the top:

Note: It is not recommended to add a SmartThings Hub to a Location with an existing Hub.

https://support.smartthings.com/hc/en-us/articles/115002084806-How-to-add-a-SmartThings-Hub-

Note that it doesn’t say it’s not possible. It says not recommended.

But I haven’t seen a full list of what can go wrong.

In the classic app:

You can have only one Hub per Location.

https://support.smartthings.com/hc/en-us/articles/205956850-How-to-edit-Location-settings-in-the-SmartThings-Classic-app

And I do know that one of the things that can go wrong is if you add two hubs to one location in the V3 app and then you try to go back and use the V2 classic app. :scream:

So the current official guidance is don’t use more than one hub per location even if the app lets you do it.

@Brad_ST @tpmanley

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3

In a manner of speaking the safest practice is to have only 1 hub in each location (many apps don’t actually support multiple hubs per location, so even if ST does, it’ll create problems). You can’t go wrong with that.

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4

The limitation on the number of Devices is per Location, not per Hub.

Therefore, you must create additional Location(s) to add more Devices. Unfortunately, a Hub can only belong to one Location and a SmartApp can only include devices from one Location at this time.

Not sure if Scenes (etc?) will eventually support multiple Locations and thus mostly solve the device limit issue.

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5

If you use the Harmony App and would like to add ST devices to the Harmony App, this integration is broken with 2 or more hubs under one ST account.

6

That’s a good point / (unfortunate) example.

There are definitely some quirks that web services SmartApps need to properly understand and handle when connecting to multiple Locations in one Account.

This is not a SmartThings issue (as the quirks are either documented or the behavior is sufficiently consistent so that workarounds are possible…) - unless SmartThings has written the particular malfunctioning DH and/or SmartApp (which they are unlikely to fix in the legacy API).

I also suspect that issues are possible with LAN connected devices if both Hubs are on the same LAN due to the less than optimal behavior of Super LAN Connect auto-discovery feature.

But some of these risks are worthwhile, because having multiple Accounts is a bigger pain overall.