I wanted to ask a question for those that have been using the ADT hub for awhile. I just finished setting up mine yesterday as a separate location alongside my v2 Hub. I currently have all the home automation stuff on the v2 hub and just the ADT security modules on the ADT hub. Is there any reason for me NOT to start migrating over all the home automation devices to the ADT hub? Is it better to keep them separate or at this point in the game is it worth the time moving all of them over to the ADT hub? I only run some basic routines for turning on lights, heaters, and decorations. Also, is there a good external siren that integrates with the ADT hub? The one in the control panel is a bit wimpy. Thanks…
I have had my panel for about 9 months now. I dont feel there is really any advantage to keeping two hubs active. The two biggest reasons I have heard are folks not wanting to reconfigure everything on the Smartthings ADT panel and firmware updates to the smartthings environment on the panel. Simply put it seems to lag behind the smartthings only hub by a revision or two.
There is no native way to enable a extra siren for the Smartthings ADT Panel. If you have a wired sire there are contacts on the back of the panel that you can wire to. You can also use the “ADT Tools” Smartapp which will allow you to integrate any Zwave/zigbee siren with alert events that trigger from the ADT Panel. I have a Arlo camera system that has the built in siren. It is has been added to go off when my panel has an alarm. My wife triggered it a little while ago and was pretty loud.
I have the ADT Hub and switched from V2. I would say the only downside is the lack of apps on the ADT hub. They limited the apps and capabilities for ADT’s safety. Example: button controller is not available on the ADT hub. You also can’t create virtual switches on the ADT hub. That’s a big downfall.
The other issue to take into consideration is whether you will still have a strong mesh on both hubs if you start splitting devices between them. You might end up having to add some additional repeating devices to one or both.
I am not sure about that. The Apps were certainly limited, but I dont think virtual devices are. I have several virtual devices and the ADT Tools Momentary button tile device handler is a virtual button designed to work with ADT Tools for mode control.
As I understand it, and it has been discussed extensively in the forum, they didn’t limit anything that is on the home automation side. There are still virtual switches, there are certainly still button controllers.
But the ADT/SmartThings hub has two separate Silos. The one that is able to contact the ADT monitoring center is, indeed, as you mentioned quite limited. Only the dual logo devices can trigger a call, and some of the features are not available to anything except the built-in automations.
That may be exactly what you meant if you were just referring to the ADT side of it, I just wanted to clarify.
There’s a lot of discussion about all of this in the following active thread:
Thanks for the feedback, all. I think I will slowly migrate everything over to the ADT hub and then put the v2 hub up in storage in case I decide to go back to it later. I take a look at the ADT Tools and see if I can figure it out.