I posted here back in March hoping to get some resolution to an issue regarding Smartthings, my thermostat, and the erratic inability for Smartthings to choose between Celsius, Fahrenheit, or “unlabeled” temperatures. I wasn’t happy to find out that these sort of problems have existed for months, and seemingly ignored, or given the usual CS rug sweeping.
That being said, I went ahead re-addressed my routines to try and find holes or workarounds. In my particular situation, I can’t have a straight-forward “if hot, cool, if cold, heat” type of routine. My house isn’t segmented into independent zones with central heating/cooling. And several critical use rooms tend to run 6 - 15 degrees hotter than the rest of the house. I needed a complex set of routines interacting with each other to monitor the different room temperatures constantly, and apply different heating/cooling solutions for each situation.
Two nights ago, I thought I finally had the problem sorted. When finalizing my routines (after checking my if-than logic, I discovered that the old honeywell thermostat was only allowing Smartthings to interact with it’s temperature probe in Celsius. OKAY then! I’ve got an Aeotec multisensor in that room, I’ll use it’s temperature sensor instead. Problem solved!
That night and the next day, the routines kicked in, the house heated with cold, turned off when my studio got too hot, and the air conditioning kicked in when it needed to. The house was finally balancing out and becoming comfortable from top to bottom.
However, I woke up this morning to a freezing cold house. The heat hadn’t turned on since yesterday morning. It was locked into “OFF”. A quick check of my routines showed that this time, the Smartthings button I was using to monitor the temperature in my studio had forgotten what degrees were. All it said in it’s routine was “70”, not “70 F”.
When I tried to re-enter the correct temperature, the button refused to be dealt with in anything other than Celsius.
It has become completely apparent that the problem wasn’t with the thermostat, it’s with Smartthings itself. I’ve tried everything I can think of. Using different devices to create the routines, resetting the hub, changing batteries… nothing solves this problem. And apparently asking for help or pointing out the issue falls on deaf ears too.
At this point, unless there is a rapid fix / work-around, I can’t imagine continuing to use Smartthings in my home. I could handle the occasional wonky light response, an errant sensor delay here and there. But when it comes to “mission critical” house management that directly effects the health and happiness of my family and myself? Not a chance.
I don’t know what’s happened to Samsung lately. In the past year I’ve seen my Samsung phone software forget how to phone, my smart watches don’t reconnect when they should and receive updates every other day that simply get in the way but never seem to fix anything, and Smartthings can’t tell the difference between Celsius, Fahrenheit, or even what a temperature is.
And the worst bit, is that all of these things either get ignored, or the response is completely unacceptable. (For example: in order to allow my phone to actually make and receive WIFI phone calls, I was told that I had to reformat my cache drive after every single phone call.) Hearing that others have reported this exact same issue FOR MONTHS, only to be told “it’ll be fixed in the next update” or to have their posts ignored/deleted is incredibly frustrating and disheartening.
So, for right now, I’m on my way to Home Assistant. I didn’t want to go this route yet. Even though I’ve ordered the zwave and zigbee sticks already, and I’m prepping to re-purpose my raspberry Pi, there’s still a part of me that’s hoping that some solution or some software patch will come through and I don’t have to abandon Samsung.
Honestly, with how Samsung has been across the board latey? I’m not holding my breath.
Please pleasantly surprise me.
