I need some help. I’m not a super savvy ST user and I certainly don’t do anything complicated ST so keep that in mind
Here’s our situation.
We have our home and we have a shared vacation home with friends.
We have ST at home and it works good, most do the time. We have it linked with our Amazon account for voice control with Alexa.
I added a second hub, at the vacation house and created a second location. For the most part that situation is good.
We have a separate Amazon account for the vacation home we share with friends.
For quite a while using Alexa to control ST at home worked greet and when we were at the vacation home it worked great for those devices too.
Now all the sudden, when I have the Alexa skill linked to home, Alexa won’t control anything at the vacation home and vice versa. Used to work just fine with one ST account, 2 locations and using separate Amazon accounts, 1 for each location.
Did Amazon or ST change something earlier this year where it won’t work?
Anytime I connect Alexa it says I’m giving it permission at all locations. Yet when it’s working at my home, Alexa doesn’t work at the vacation home and when it’s working there, Alexa doesn’t work at home.
My understanding based on comments on this forum was that you could only have one Amazon account actively linked to a SmartThings account at a time. You might be able to apparently connect two but only the latest was actually active. I’ve never tried it myself.
Also the linking is at the SmartThings account level not at the Location level.
I think what you might like to try is to link your home Amazon account to a SmartThings account that is only a member of your home Location, and link your vacation Amazon account to a separate SmartThings account that is only a member of your vacation Location.
I’ve not heard of any changed behaviour in the years since the integration moved away from the legacy platform but then I wouldn’t be maintaining a close interest.
That is correct. If you link two Alexa accounts to one ST account, one of them will become inactive eventually. I found this out when trying to set up Alexa location tracking where my GF and I each have separate Alexa accounts trying to share one ST account. Had to create a separate ST account for her.
That is all. So frustrating. This system worked for a year or so but, not any longer.
So if I make a second ST account, do I have to be loggged into it to use my phone as a presence sensor?
ST, at the vacation home, is simply there to run automations. Some happen regardless of someone being present and others are dependent on someone being present.
Home, that’s a different story. I use the ST app often to control things.
What’s really weird is our friends have a separate Amazon account and no personal ST account and when I have to log back into Amazon and link it to the vacation home, it’s adds things from their home Amazon account.
Alexa links at the account level. Everything in your account, regardless of location, will be learned. You can’t change that. Your only choice is to put the other location in a separate ST account if you don’t want your vacation Alexa account to learn your home devices.
If you go the separate account for the second location, yes, you will have to log in to the ST account for the vacation location in order for it to register your ST presence at that location.
If I understand correctly, you log in to a different Alexa account at the vacation location. If that’s the case, you could use Alexa location tracking to trigger virtual presence in the vacation ST account without having to be logged in to that account. And you would need to login to the vacation Alexa account prior to arriving at the vacation location so that it would recognize your arrival. I strictly use Alexa location tracking and have been quite pleased with its reliability.
The opposite happened to me.
I already had my alexa linked to my ST account and everything was working fine at home.
Then my mother added me to her location so I could use the ST app to control the devices and my alexa at home which uses a different amazon account discovered a lot of new devices from the new location.
I had to ask her to remove myself because it bloated my alexa with a lot of new devices.
We should be able to select which locations we would allow alexa to control.
I don’t know how it is now. It happened like 2 months ago.
Thanks for the info. Is this a ST issue or an Amazon issue?
Not at all keen on having to make sure people are logging in and out of accounts.
Seems super cumbersome.
Still baffled at how it worked before.
What if each person had a keychain presence sensor on their key ring only set up for the vacation house? Wouldn’t need to log in on their phone then correct?
I’m not a big fan of Alexa’s system. I’ve never had good luck running anything with it, that’s why I chose to use the Alexa devices only for voice command
Maybe we need to look into apple HomeKit for the vacation house, we’re all apple device users
That’s a bit encouraging however way more advanced than I am I’d think. What is that?
The issue is, I don’t care if we have a separate ST account, I just don’t want to have to rely on any or all of the 4 of us to log off one account and log into another.
I’ve been thinking, look our world, and if we have a vacation house account for Alexa, which we do, and a vacation house account for ST it appears that I could simply set up a skill where all we would need to do is tell Alexa, via the dots in the house, that we’re there and then it could set the location statue to home or away.
Right now, I have it set that inside lights are on until a certain time if nobody is present. If any of us are present, it cancels the regular off schedule.
I also have it set to turn the air up or heat down where we’re away and turn the air down and heat up when we’re there. All this is triggered by the geofence on our phones.
What I don’t get is why does Alexa app add my home things into the vacation house account and when the skills are linked, I can’t control both places despite it saying, on the Alexa app, it will allow access to all locations.
I set up Alexa Skill on one of my Hubitat hubs a long time ago, and honestly, I forgot whether there was a location choice during the initial setup… But I see in the app properties locale = us-east-1, although I am in Europe. So most probably, I have used my amazon.com account credentials during the setup (not the amazon.de where my Echoes are registered). And yes, I can select which devices exactly to expose to Alexa, otherwise, it will be a mess with more than 100 devices pushed to the Amazon cloud. I expose only these, which I really need to control by voice, such as TVs, ACs, TRVs, and zone (rooms) lights actuators.
SmartThings issue. It affects multiple third-party integrations. And, as others have mentioned, other home automation platforms, such as hubitat, do allow you to restrict which devices Alexa will see. Smartthings did for several years, but stopped doing so, I believe in 2018, and now integration is just at the account level. but since it’s been going on for so long, and people have been complaining since the change first occurred, I don’t think it’s likely to change again.
but since it’s been going on for so long, and people have been complaining since the change first occurred, I don’t think it’s likely to change again. 