I’m sure that’s frustrating! There are a lot of things that can help, including a zigbee repeater, but it depends on the exact problem you’re having. Support@smartthings.com can help review your setup and may have some suggestions.
You might also find the following topic interesting, there’s a lot of discussion of different things people have done that made presence more reliable in their particular situation:
Thanks @JDRoberts. I’d really like to use the presence sensors for my house keeper and various other people.
Speaking of presence sensors, the one I have in the car has been working exceptionally well in the past few days. Don’t know if the wind direction has changed, or is the improvements ST has been making, but I didn’t make any changes to my set up.
For what it’s worth, adding a SmartPower outlet on a front wall of our house overlooking the driveway made a night and day difference in the reliability of our presence sensors.
Again, take this with a grain of salt due to all of the reasons JD mentioned, but it’s not unheard of.
If the problem is the presence sensor not being detected as you approach the house from a particular direction, that’s frequently an issue of signal drop off, and can often be fixed with a zigbee repeater on that side of the house.
Garages in particular tend to have a lot of stuff that can cause signal drop off including concrete, big metal objects like bicycles and cars, even just a pegboard wall with tools hanging on it. If your garage doors are metal, that’s yet another source of signal dropoff. So A zigbee repeater near a window on that side of the house can help a lot.
On the other hand, there are a lot of other possible issues that can arise, so it just depends on the details.
about 50% of the time the presence sensor does not initiate HH actions. The biggest problem is definitely having the sensor report that it leaves and then returns at all crazy times during the night. I don’t have a lot of architecture to block the presence sensor from the hub except maybe some drywall.
Thanks for all of the feedback. I really appreciate it.
Well that’s not a very satisfactory answer: “Spend money on our new product, re-integrate all your devices. Don’t worry about why, just trust us, but if you really want to know, you can dig for info”.
It doesn’t exactly provide any sort of compelling reason to upgrade, does it?
I’m pretty sure Ben said somewhere if you don’t care about local processing or camera support you should hold of on upgrading.
Edit- I cant seem to find it so maybe I imagined it.
I’d be happy if I could control ANYTHING with SmartThings right now. Not a single working device… AGAIN (this is about the sixth time in the last couple of years). All devices work with their native apps but SmartThings doesn’t have correct status for any of them, and although it reports its turning devices on or off, they don’t actually change state. I’m so sick of this crap.
Found it. FYI
By “native apps” you are referring to specific integrations like Hue, WeMo… etc??
Can you list for me? … Just curious.
These specific types of integrations continue to be a weak area. I think most are not in the officially compatible / supported list or are “Labs” (small print…).
I totally agree… As I’m sure I’ve said enough times to be annoying. There no single place where all ST issues are listed. But if you think about it, it’s clear that not everything is solved by Hub V2 (and the risk of new issues definitely exists!).
No, that’s not what they’ve said, at all, is it?
How many times do people have to repeat it? Thursday or Friday at IFA Berlin people…
@Benji, Opening your smart app is not an automated task. Local processing is for automation. Sensor-based automation, schedules, alarms, locks, etc, will still work, which is a large benefit over the v1 hub. If you need some finger-actuated things available during an internet service outage, consider some push-button remotes where you can configure lights, switches, phrases, modes, and more with a press and press-and-hold.
People need different things. There’s no one answer for this.
I’m quadriparetic in a wheelchair with limited hand function. At a minimum I need to be able to have my door unlock and my lights come on without having to push any buttons.
To be honest, I’m disappointed that there won’t be tablet control, because there are competitors that do offer that without Internet connection. But then the competitors don’t offer me as many features that I want when the Internet is available, which is a lot more of the time, so there it is.
But having been through some downtime situations, the one thing I found is that you can’t predict in advance what you’re going to want to have happen. It’s pretty much the definition of unexpected. So I preferto have even more flexibility that I have when setting up everyday routine.
But again everybody handles things differently and has different priorities.
I’ve had similar issues and it came down to a bug in the hub hardware after much debugging. Reported it to ST support and they said they were aware of it and hopefully it’ll be fixed in v2.
The bug is something like this, if there’s a power fluctuation it causes the z-wave module of the hub to stop functioning. The hub appears to be online but no Z-Wave functions work (network and other processing work) but Z-Wave doesn’t, soft reboot/z-wave repair have no effect. The answer is to physically unplug and replug the power cord. Now it works fine. This is a very repeatable scenario and unfortunately the hardware doesn’t seem to handle power fluctuations well. Try it out.
Why not have a thread that lists all issues, free of comments but with links for workarounds. It will definitely help the newcomers and keep all of us tuned. As for the ‘silver bullet’ code named V2, will likely not solve the problems and perhaps will add a few new ones BUT my hope is that once the dust settles with the release of new apps, new sensors, new hub, much of the effort that presumably has been locked on developing and testing, will be finally freed and the focus will shift towards resolving the lingering issues.
To be clear, I’m all in favor of more options. I do want to see the Bluetooth radio in the new hub turned on. As I mentioned, an immediate obvious use is for a Bluetooth lock for someone who lives in a small apartment.
It’s just that there’s a reason Bluetooth isn’t already the basis for home automation, and there’s a reason why the HomeKit bridge and tunnels approach is so interesting.
The limit on the number of devices That can be paired to any one station, and the lack of mesh extend the range, Will restrict the number of use cases that Bluetooth fits in a hub model.
But there will be some use cases where it will be perfect. So, like I said, I do think that will be a good feature for the new hub once it’s turned on. I just don’t think it’s going to immediately offer dozens of new practical device choices for most home layouts. But we’ll see.
Oh absolutely agreed, the concern was that same people (including me initially) were under the impression that the ‘local control’ would imply that you were still able to do stuff from your phone as well provided you were on the same subnet as your ST hub, even with the Internet out.
As pointed out this is not the case and I just want to make others aware so there is no disappointment. It would of course be nice if this were possible in the future but for now, it’s not.
Hmm I was under the same impression that local control means that I can use my smart phone via LAN