When(if) to get a new hub

Hello,

I’ve had a second generation SmartThings Hub for quite a few years now. I have 14 Smart light switches, multiple motion sensors, contact sensors, thermostats, zwave door locks etc. I really have nothing but good experiences with S.T.

I liked working with pistons- I was able to create some complex automations and really like the potential power they possessed. The new S.T. ‘automations’ aren’t as robust.

…and now they introduce Matter… I watch some YouTubers tell me it isn’t all unicorns and rainbows… I don’t mind adding new features but I don’t want to lose any of my current ones, either.

So where is all of this going? Do I put things in neutral and coast for a year or so until Matter plays itself out? Do I stick with S.T. or switch to Amazon or Google (not an Apple fan). The Google nest hub looks pretty cool. I would like to create moderately complex automations.

good luck -Jim

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I would.

No one really knows what Matter will be like yet, we don’t 100% Know what the new smartthings architecture will be or how reliable it will be, the Google Nest Hub looks cool but it isn’t actually a hub: you can’t add Zigbee or Z wave devices to it, just the usual Wi-Fi cloud to cloud and some Bluetooth. It may eventually get thread to support matter but it’s not there yet.

So… if what you have now is working now stick with it and you should have a lot more information in a year or so. :sunglasses:

You may have to give up Webcore much sooner than that, but I will leave that for others to discuss.

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yup, im ‘coasting’ too with a handful of hubs. some with under 50 and others with 300 devices.

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At this point, your v2 hub does everything the v3 and Aeotec hubs do, so there is no immediate need to buy another SmartThings one.

Personally, I’ve invested in another Zigbee/Z-wave hub with all local processing and are using that for all my home automation needs. I have a second one of those, but only as a spare. My SmartThings v2 hub is still online and has under 10 real devices left on (just this past week I moved the last of my window contact sensors off of it). I’ll wait and see what SmartThings morphs into over the next 2 years, and avoid all the platform turmoil as they change the fundamentals.

Only on SmartThings. On the other platform it will live on.

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Thank you all,

What is the reasoning behind multiple hubs? What about 300+ devices? How do you amass that many? I personally could see myself with 30 smart switches, 10 smart outlets and maybe a few dozen sensors, (& misc. stuff) but that would be over the top for me…

Forgive me if the questions seem dumb… I’m a bit of a weekend warrior- I won’t do much for months at a time and hit it hard for a few weeks.

good luck -jim

You can’t directly utilize multiple hubs on a SmartThings hub. (I’m not including the wifi mesh device)

I have 120+ Zigbee (mostly sensors) and 30+ Z-wave devices (mostly switches). I ran this all on my v2 SmartThings hub, and now on a single Hubitat hub. Both have been more than powerful enough to handle all the device traffic from the two meshes and automation processing.

(I have lately been adding more Zigbee light bulbs, which have been known to cause some issues. If I ever begin to experience Zigbee issues, I’m reserving the backup hub to use as a possible 2nd Zigbee mesh for just bulbs to isolate them from my sensor mesh. Hubitat has a “hub mesh” feature that transparently knits devices from multiple hubs, so I’d use that)

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It varies. When I purchased my second SmartThings hub the reasons were:

  1. I only had one. Two is twice as many.
  2. I didn’t want my main hub on the beta firmware programme but I wanted to take part.
  3. I wanted to see how multiple hubs behaved in the same SmartThings location (answer: a minor insignificant problem in the legacy ecosystem, and absolutely perfectly in the current ecosystem until onboarding in the Android app was tarted up several months ago and they broke it).
  4. Not every routing device on my mesh stays on 365/24/7 and certain brands don’t like that so partitioning the mesh was wise.
  5. Aqara devices are picky about their routers, so if I wanted to use other routers I needed to partition the meshes.
  6. I wanted a hub I could ‘play’ with without buggering everything up.

Item 4) and 5) are no longer an issue as my Aqara sensors were introduced to the crusher in the bin lorry.

When I bought my third SmartThings hub it was because:

  1. The starter kit used to have a retail price of £200 but was regularly available for £100 which was less than the retail cost of the devices in it. So many UK users purchased the kit and sold off the hub, and often the presence sensor tag, at relatively bargain prices. So I paid about £40 for mine. My second hub was used for about £20. As I would be reluctant to ever pay more than about £50 for a hub and new ones cost over twice that now, I thought a spare for under £20 would be a useful precaution.
  2. It gave me the option to play with multiple hubs in multiple locations.

I also have an IKEA gateway. This was largely to allow me to update the firmware in my IKEA devices but I also wanted to be able to put my hubs on smart outlets and it makes no sense to have said outlets directly dependent on SmartThings. However if it integrated with SmartThings as it does with HomeKit and voice assistants that would be really useful. The IKEA devices are just more at home on the IKEA gateway. That’s another reason for multiple hubs if you look beyond SmartThings. Sometimes things just work better elsewhere.

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while you can have more then 1 hub on a single account to sub-divide things up like smoke/co and water leak on one hub, switches and outlets on another, and door/window and motion for alarm on another, things get tricky if you try to automate/alarm across different hubs.