Currently adding a fallback mifi connection to my Smartthings system but I am getting 500 mb download per hour from the hub. I have been reading older posts where people have seen less then a mb per hour. I currently have 51 devices in the system mainly contacts, motion and water sensors, 2 cameras , HEMv1 and a HUE lamp. I have try disabling the cameras and Hue but still seeing high data consumption. Does anyone have any knowledge as to why my readings would be so high?
Dave
I assume HEM is home energy monitor? If so, those can be very chatty so maybe that’s it? I still can’t imagine it chewing through 500mb an hour though
Yes Home Energy Monitor V1, I will take this off the system and check although I changed the reporting time to 5 minutes but I guess it could be the culprit. I am measuring the data from my Pepwave Router specifically for the Smartthings Hub IP so I believe that’s an accurate bandwidth usage. In order to add a backup MIFI for internet connectivity I would be willing to eliminate devices, but most of my devices operate locally and not through the cloud. If I eliminate the 2 cameras and the Hue hub I can drop the usage to 280mb and hour, but even that is too high to use cellular back-up.
Are you saying MB as in megabytes or megabits? If that’s megabytes that’s insane.
That is Megabytes
Mind. Blown.
yes, looks like junk video traffic to me. Did you positively identify the IP address(es) of the largest consumers?
I’d turn the cameras OFF completely, you’d know in 1-2 hours if that was it.
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Video is the only thing I can think of. Cameras are constantly streaming to the hub, but that data shouldn’t make it out to the internet unless a clip is recording or you’re watching the stream. @ero4444 has good advice with actually turning off the cameras to check data use.
I did shut cameras off still had about 190-210 MB ( Did not remove the smart app or device handler). Later I will try taking the HEM off the system just in case that’s an issue. The only Cloud devices are 2 Aeon Multifunction Alarms, Accuweather, Chime, 2 Cameras, Hue Lamp and a Utilitech Water Sensor. All other devices are local execution. I am also going to try Wireshark and see if I can isolate some sort of traffic.
FYI:
Statistics we collected from ActionTiles revealed that “power / energy” measurement Events (from HEM’s and power measuring outlets) account for over 80% of all SmartThings activity.
Yes; you read that correctly. Well over 80% of all SmartThings activity.
I suggest removing the HEM, as, at my first glance, that is the most likely culprit (other than video), unless there is bug in the Hub.
But still, surely the data HEMs send is still not that large? It may be a large %age but I can’t see it accounting for 100’s of MBs. Then again, I’ve been wrong before (I think it was in the early 1970’s some time, lol).
Video streaming is usually the biggest data hog followed by audio.
It depends on the Hub event-transmit clumping. In our case, one of our cloud vendors was charging for all the overhead on SSL connection establish and teardown. That overhead exceeded the data size by a huge magnitude.
I will have to look at the Power Meter aspect besides the Hem, I have 5 Aeon DSC6106( awesome device) in my system. I will remove them and see if the usage comes down. As for video, by removing them still have over 190 MB. I should note that uploads are around 20 MB.
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I have a couple of DSC6106 too and love them.
While power / energy reporting may not be the bandwidth hog, I can’t help but mention how absolutely incredible I find it that SmartThings has done nothing to throttle Events of these types. This accounts for 80% of the device event load in their Cloud! In turn, that impacts all of their Customers (us!). 