I adopted smartthings back in 2014 and loved it from the beginning, I had my first home setup exactly how I wanted it and things worked flawlessly. I even upgraded from the V1 hub to the V2 hub. Then when I sold the house I negotiated to leave the system in place for the new owners. No big deal Smartthings is awesome I’ll just buy a new hub and be on my way.
Thats where the trouble started. Sure I bought a V2 hub because thats the hub I know and like and is still for sale on Amazon.
But when I went to set things up things got wonky. The classic app sort of worked but never the way it did on my old hub devices would disappear, somehow my location stopped working, etc. But the real kicker was Zigbee not working… Including the devices I bought with the new hub Smartthings branded motion sensors, multi-purpose sensors etc.
No problem, I thought, support has always been super responsive to email, I’ll just shoot them an email and I’m sure they will take a look at my hub and get it straightened out quickly.
In the first email I got back it had some basic troubleshooting steps… Ok, I thought I’ve been through these but sure I’ll give them a try. But then the second email and the third email and the fourth email most times days after my response all had the same basic level of troubleshooting steps attached to them.
Sure I was busy and didn’t immediately respond to the emails I got from Smartthings support and took a few days on my own so I thought maybe I was just a low priority because of my response time.
But then I responded back with a suggestion for support, perhaps my hub is being seen in two different locations and thats why my zigbee isn’t working correctly. I’ve logged into the IDE and I can see the radio is working could you take a look at my hub and just check.
Radio silence for weeks from Smartthings. So I call the support number, talk to a nice enough rep who walks through basic trouble shooting again but at least she was looking at my hub while we were doing it, and she came up with I think theres something wrong with the zigbee radio, lets get it RMAs’d.
I thought great! this is progress, I didn’t think there was anything wrong with the hardware because she could see the devices as I was trying to add them they just didn’t add into the app, but hey new hardware means at least were moving forward.
Send along the proof of purchase and I’ll get it escalated to get RMA approval she said. Fantastic, I send the invoice while still on the phone with the rep and she confirms receipt and gets it imported into the ticket. Someone will call you back in a few days she said.
Then 7 days go by, I think hmm I better call and see what the hold up is. It shouldn’t take this long to look at a ticket and approve an RMA so I call back. The new rep also helpful says it looks like it just hasn’t been approved yet I’ll send another reminder to get it approved.
So now its been 3 months I’ve owned the sort of functioning hub and I’m wondering, has the Samsung machine just broken my beloved smartthings, and turned them into just another Samsung product?
Is it time to just cut my losses and switch to hubitat or homeseer, or dare i say Wink?
man this sucks, the chat option is gone on Smartthings app.