Just looking for some friendly advice on a new Smarthome build. Back in February of this year, I upgraded my legacy security system and integrated it with smartthings. Now Ive progressed to:
10 smart outlets
15 light switches
4 fan controllers
2 smart light bulbs
1 Garage door opener
1 Video doorbell
10 routines
3 modes
4 Sonos speakers
Everything is controlled with Alexa. I recently have the need to purchase security cameras and have been on these forums quite a bit. Camera integration seems to be a pain in the ass, and the Arlo/Ring cameras are crap. I’ve seen so many threads with folks and so many issues, things not working and things going down. This variability makes me worried. I have a friend who just built a custom home and wants me to make his home like mine.
I would hate to build out my friends home using smartthings only to have things not working properly. Do I have anything to be worried about when I copy my setup to a much larger home than mine? I am running Alexa, BigTalker2, ActionTiles, LIFX, Konnected and Skybell.
I’ve been down the rabbit hole of options, but outside of Control4/Savant, nothing seems to be as clean for a single hub solution. Perhaps I am missing other options? I’ve looked into HomeSeer, TP-link Kasa, Wink, Lutron Caseta. I would prefer everything just work, if it went down, Im happy to help, but part of me is thinking yeah, maybe you should take that $$$$ quote you got from the builder/dealer. The best thing I can see is Hubitat. But perhaps I am asking the wrong questions, and maybe overthinking the issues other folks have.
If your friend can afford control 4, I would go with that.
HomeKit with Lutron is another possibility, but most custom homes also want integration with home theater systems, and control 4 is way better at that.
Smartthings is in the middle of a huge transition: new hub, new cloud platform, new app. And so far, it looks like they are trying to really simplify the features. For example, the new app does not allow you to automate the unlocking of a door at all ( you have to open the app to do it). And you cannot use Geopresence to arm/disarm the security system.
Staff said many times that their typical customer has 15 or fewer devices and uses no custom code at all. (That would include Konnected and webcore). They’ve also said that eventually the classic App will go away.
So while they haven’t said for sure, it really looks like their trajectory is to make sure that Samsung appliances and televisions work really well in the app for that group that has 15 or fewer devices. That’s a perfectly reasonable business model, but it doesn’t really match up with what you are describing.
If you were building a house yourself, then I think you could consider hubitat. It’s a tiny company, But because everything runs locally, even if the company went out of business tomorrow, whatever you had working would continue to work. But I can’t recommend it for someone who is Selecting projects for another person – – there’s just too much hands-on tinkering still required.
As I’ve mentioned before, I now budget my home automation purchases on the assumption that whatever I have, including the hub, will need to be replaced in three years. So essentially I’m paying a monthly amount like I would for a mobile phone, assuming that three years from now there will be something else that I want. If I end up using things longer, that’s a bonus, but this has removed a great deal of my frustration and anxiety over my home automation choices. I only buy things that I would be comfortable psychologically and economically replacing in three years.
@JDRoberts, Yuk! Where did you see this about SmartThings? And, where do we complain? The new app sucks, and if they get rid of the old app, a lot of people are going to be upset.
About the transition? It’s been officially discussed by staff multiple times in these forums and it was presented at the Samsung developers conference in both 2017 and 2018. It’s not new news.
Official support article on the new app, including the fact that the classic app will eventually be going away:
