Hi All,
I have a Samsung TV, Sound Bar, etc, which works fine both through the Smarthings app and also integration with Google Home.
I’m now looking to have Samsung Aircon installed in a second home. Would there be any issues with this? i.e. I’d like to be able to control the temperature of the second house remotely.
Thanks in advance, Duncan
SmartThings supports multiple locations (with and without hubs) just fine. You can add a new location in the app, and you’ll select which location you’re viewing. Routines and automations can’t cross locations natively.
I’m not sure how Google Home handles multiple locations or if it combines everything into one. Alexa combines all locations into one name space which can be annoying.
Not terribly well in my opinion. The problem is largely with the ‘speaker’ devices such as the Home Mini which, despite being allocated to a Room in a Home, will actually access all the Homes a user belongs to and treat them as a single namespace. Rooms with the same name in multiple Homes can be treated as the same Room. Not only that but they can help themselves to the privileges of other users registered on the device. Basically if a user account exists in more than one Home you should probably consider those Homes as bridged, and not only that but you may struggle to separate them.
Going back to the original post, SmartThings makes a decent job of multiple Locations. However with the integration with voice assistants being at the account level, and Alexa apparently also capable of making a pigs ear of multiple Locations, it is worth creating a dedicated SmartThings account for each SmartThings Location so you can share at the Location level when required.
But then doing this requires multiple accounts for Amazon/Alexa or (likely) Google Home. Not very easy to manage from mobile, signing in and out of multiple accounts.
I’ve been living with the Alexa issues for multiple locations… For instance, for thermostats each device has the location name in its label, so you have to specify which one. If you don’t, you get the “There are multiple devices with that name, did you mean…?” prompt.
The simplest solution is to buy a different hub for the second house but add it to your same account.
That’s how I handle 4 different locations in the US with no issues. When you open the app in the top left you can select the location you want to control/look at.
If the second home is in another country it might be worth setting up a separate account as some things (frequencies, voltages, celsius) could be different. I also did that but you will need to run the second account on a different phone as I don’t believe you can run two SmartThings apps on the same phone. For me it was easier to keep them separate.
Great - many thanks all. Extremely helpful.
Best wishes, Duncan