I have two SmartThings WiFi hubs with Plume and they won’t accept edge drivers. I contacted support over a month ago and occasionally get a email asking for information I already provided. I received a email today asking for the serial number. I sent it to them for a third time. Should I toss these hubs and buy something else? Maybe the V3 hubs? Thanks
EVALUATED AS A SMARTTHINGS HUB
The V3 hubs (now sold under the Aeotec brand) definitely work better with edge drivers and are updated more often.
In addition, the fact that there is no hardware partner announced for the plume hubs has always concerned me. They feel like an “end of life“ product, even if that hasn’t been officially announced.
EVALUATED AS A WIFI MESH ROUTER
There’s also the fact that the Wi-Fi mesh aspect is quite limited compared to most of the competition. Most WiFi routers work just fine for local communication between devices in the same home even if the internet is out. The SmartThings WiFi mesh models do not—they require a cloud connection even to run the local WiFi.
That may not be a big deal for you. In my semi rural area we do lose cloud connections a few times a year, so having WiFi that still runs, especially for home automation, is important. Of course, there is the fact that the SmartThings app always requires a cloud connection, even if it’s on the same local WiFi as your hub, so local WiFi might not help. In my case I use a different home automation platform for my mission critical devices, and that one does have an app that works for local control, so local WiFi does mean a lot for me. But again might not matter to you.
BUT WE’RE STILL IN THE MIDDLE OF THE TRANSITION TO THE NEW ARCHITECTURE
So I think only you can decide if it’s time to retire the plume model. Especially with the big transition going on. It’s hard to judge right now where SmartThings will end up when compared with other Matter-capable systems. 
SPEAKING OF MIGRATION: THERE’S NO UTILITY FOR THAT
Also note that there is no migration utility: if you do get new hubs, you have to rebuild everything that is “hub-connected” from scratch (mostly zwave and zigbee devices), the same as if you went to a new platform altogether. Tedious.
SUMMARY
So there is an argument that if everything is working ok now, it’s just FOMO, and you’d be ok if you woke up one morning and all your zwave and zigbee devices had just stopped working and you had to pick a new system then, waiting to see what happens might make sense.
If you want, or need, to get ahead of the game and you’re ok with all the rebuilding that will be required, switching to the Aeotec V3 could make sense.
But it’s your call.
ONE LAST THING: NEW SETUP HARDWARE REQUIREMENTS ARE STILL UNKNOWN
How many zwave and zigbee devices do you have now? And how many different models?
I ask because people are running into memory issues for the edge drivers, in some cases with as few as 15 or 20 edge drivers.
Some community members have already started adding a second or even second and third Aeotec hubs in order to spread the load. And things are still in transition.
So it might be hard to spec just what your new setup would look like in terms of hubs required, and it would be really annoying to have to go through all that migration work twice. 
2 Likes
BTW, @nayelyz has been tracking this issue, I don’t know if she has any further information.
@Robrall
I added 2 more V3 hubs for a total of 3 hubs now after some advice from a couple of very helpful community members. With the migration and a lot of members jumping ship and going to other platforms, used hubs have become plentiful and reasonably priced on Ebay and Mercari.
My original V3 hub was struggling after I migrated everything over to Edge drivers and my routines running locally. Now everything seems like it is running smooth, no more having to reboot daily and both my Zwave and Zigbee meshes seem solid again. I’m migrating my Zwave devices to the second hub and cloud stuff to the third. Out of 156 devices, I only have 36 Zwave devices, so that’s the reason I’m moving Zwave to one of the new hubs and not Zigbee.
The hubs are cheap enough but its your decision on what meet’s your needs. If you can easily replace your Wifi mesh and add all your devices back to the new hub or hub’s then I would say go for it.
My long-term plan is to wait and see how the ST Station works for other users and then maybe next year migrate everything to 3 or 4 of them and dump my Zwave device. From what I’m reading it seems like you can have multiple Stations all working together and extending your setup.
I have also migrated all of my complex automations to Sharptools. I had originally created a lot of routines to do this. With all of the routines working locally on the hub they just didn’t work reliably anymore.
2 Likes
I haven’t seen that except for thread. They’re definitely not WiFi mesh routers and they don’t have zwave. So the open question is zigbee. Do you have a link on the “working together” details for the new Station?
1 Like
I have read so many articles on this, I think it was one of the CES articles. I will try and find it and send you the link.
2 Likes
New update is supposed to help with some edge, driver issues, but not all. Note that you must have updated the Wi-Fi router side to the most current version or the home automation side won’t update.
2 Likes
Sorry for the late reply. Thanks for posting this. I’m hopeful the update fixes the problem.
I was having major issues with my Schlage BE469ZP on version 43.5. The lock could join the network but the hub could not get messages sent to the lock. The lock would eventually go offline and with certain drivers, it would cause the hub to get congested and result in a complete meltdown of my Z-Wave network. 45.11 was pushed to my hub yesterday and magically, my lock is now working with no issues. Additionally, the ST Sonos Edge driver that was acting wonky on the previous version is now working as expected.
So, in general, it’s solved the issues I was having. YMMV
1 Like