I am currently trying to decide whether I should go with a
Smarththings hub or Wink. On a whole, I like Smartthings much better, but the
reason I am considering Wink is Lutron. I have one scenario, that if I can find
an acceptable Smartthings solution, I will take the plunge.
I have a couple lamps that are using Lutron’s caseta
wireless plug in lamp dimmers. The reason I love these so much is because I can
take the included remote, put it in a wall plate on the wall and it looks like
all my other switches and I can turn the lamps on and off manually when walking
into a room or control them through the bridge. I don’t want to have to take
out my phone to turn lamps on and off. I
want the lamps connected to my bridge so that I can have them turn on and off
when I am out of town and have one routine to turn all my lights on or off at
night.
I used to have the same issue. Personally what I’ve done is swap out the plug-in dimmer with a GE Z-Wave plug-in dimmer. Then I used my Staples Connect hub (the system I previously was using) to join my SmartThings Z-wave network as a secondary controller and paired a pico remote to the Staples Connect hub and created the associations. Unfortunately you won’t be able to actually dim but you can use the buttons to set preset dimming levels. I personally have the ‘On’ button set the dimmer to 50%, the ‘Favorite’ button set it to 1% and the ‘Dimming Up/Down’ (both considered a single button) set it to 100%.
It’s not a perfect solution but it works fine for me. Only issue is that this only works with a Staples Connect hub (Wink won’t let you control Z-Wave with a pico remote) and the hub is $76.99 currently.
So you are basically using the wall mounted Pico remote to control the staples hub, which in turn controls the plug in dimmer that the lamps are connected to? And then, If I’m understanding correctly, you can use your smartthings hub to control the plug in dimmer when I am having it do automated routines or does that have to be done through the staples hub as well? I’m ok with everything being routed through the staples hub when I use the remote manually, but I do not want to have to run automated sequences on two separate apps.
SmartThings would be your primary Z-Wave controller and all automations would run through it. Currently the only thing the Staples connect is doing is associating the Pico remote to the z-wave dimmer.
perfect! I can start on my smartthings project! I appreciate your help and will probably have to ask how to set up the staples/pico/smartthings hub when I actually do it.
Just to chime in… I started with Wink and went heavily into Lutron Caseta switches (they are absolutely the best). But Wink - totally my opinion - is a dead end. The user community for Smartthings makes this platform unparalleled.
So, I while I wait for a ST-Caseta integration, I run Wink in parallel, just for the switches; everything else migrated to ST. (I had a bunch of Z-Wave devices that I could never get Wink to manage that dropped right into ST.)
There is a thread here about rooting the Wink Hub and integrating that with ST, but although rooting Android phones is easy, I can’t figure out how to root the Wink Hub.
