I have enjoyed and not enjoyed SmartThings over the last couple years. Some things work great and others were too unreliable. For reasons of reliability, I’m moving a different direction and plan to remove my v3 hub from my account.
When I make the big move and cut the hub, will any cloud to cloud connections still work? Specifically, TP Link Kasa? For whatever reason, I’ve found that integration to work better than using Kasa’s own. Searches of the forum didn’t turn up an adequate answer.
I’m not killing all of SmartThings due to appliances, but just trying to plan this out to avoid future frustration.
Should continue to work fine as long as you don’t reset your entire SmartThings location. Just remove the hub connected devices and the hub itself from your location.
Also, in order to sell or give that hub away I should just need to factory reset it and remove it from my account, I assume. There would be no need to delete and recreate the location?
All of the cloud to cloud Integrations should still work fine, I removed my hub a couple of years ago and still use smartthings without a hub. I have integrations to Lutron, Meross, Arlo, Switchbot, and more. If you were using Phillips hue, you probably will have to remove that integration, which was likely LAN-based, and then re-add it as a cloud-based integration.
Curious what this means? Are all of your devices connected thru other apps that are then integrated thru Smartthings? If my devices are primarily Zwave and Zigbee how does this work? How to pair new devices without a ST hub?
I have just 10 Z-wave devices, but probably 40+ Zigbee devices that I’ve moved to Home Assistant (HA). Local control of those devices is awesome and as SmartThings moves more local, you’ll see an amazing difference. They’re just not there yet. Those devices need a hub, or in my case a Zooz Z-stick and a separate Zigbee coordinator I have moved to a separate floor from all interference sources.
I also have many WiFi devices including WiZ bulbs, Kasa plugs, Bond Home Hub controlled ceiling fans, Google Home / Alexa devices, and several others including Smart Life lighting strips. These devices work well, work OK, or barely work with HA. Those just working OK or barely, do work with cloud to cloud SmartThings integrations. This is a strong suit for SmartThings. To me, it’s just easier using a couple apps / systems than 10 individual apps. That’s why I am interested in ditching the hub, but not SmartThings.
Big bonus, SmartThings integrates with HA, making it a win-win.
Edit: Just to note, if you have primarily Z-wave and Zigbee, don’t switch to WiFi! I smoked an Asus router with so many devices and am finding a new TP Link AX11000 might have been too weak of a solution.
Any devices which are cloud connected are not using a SmartThings hub, they are just communicating to your smartthings account via the Internet. That would include Wi-Fi devices, but also many other devices, such as Lutron (which uses its own proprietary frequency), Bluetooth devices which have their own Wi-Fi bridge like flic buttons or SwitchBot, or even Zigbee devices which have their own hub and can communicate via the Internet like the Phillips hue bridge and its bulbs.