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ranked #218,026 most helpful
out of 571,544,897 reviews
★☆☆☆☆
Things come and go - System needs lots of work
I installed the Smartthings hub in February 2014 and slowly added devices. I slowly added devices because each device is pretty futzy to connect to. But I did get six devices finally on the hub: two multisensors, one motion sensor, one thermostat, one Jasco switch, one power switch and one presence device. Smartthings made the multisensors, the motion detector and the power switch, thus I would have thought they would connect as no brainers. NOT. Oh, and my iPhone was a device the hub recognized. Oh, I did buy and network extender but had to return it as it never ever connected to the hub.
Today, I accidentally deleted all my devices in one single tap of the ENTER key and have been working for two hours to return only one multisensor connected to the hub. My opinion is that the Z-wave protocol and/or Smartthings have not really got the stability to make connecting as easy as, say, a bluetooth device. This needs some considerable work.
I must say that Smartthings support is, on the surface, responsive. They answer mails and have online chat support. The support mostly redirects you to URLs with instructions that need following to get often nowhere. On occasion, they are successful. The guy at Smartthings does appear to feel your pain, nevertheless, there is much pain.
At daylight savings time, the light I had set to come on at 5:50am did not change over to DST until they did some magic at their server.
For a week or so my "Good morning" suite of commands disappeared. Before today's deletion-of-devices-fiasco, it had returned for a few days. However, my light on the power switch had started showing on when it was not, when I looked at the THINGS interface on the iPhone. I could cycle it and all would be good for a while. Of course, if you are not home and think something is in a certain state and it is not, this work around is pretty useless. Today, the light did not come on until I cycled it from my phone. If I had not wanted this system to work so badly, I would have reached over three feet to turn it on at the device button.
The cause of my accidental deletion of all devices was that I was trying to reinstall a multisensor that was stuck on "open." It was talking to the hub with temperature and battery level, but the raison etre was "inactive." Trying to delete and reinstall the device I somehow answered a question wrongly. Even though I was on the Smartthings support site when I committed the error, they have no backup that could restore the mess I had inadvertently created.
So now I have had time to right this review because I am waiting for the hub to find some devices. I have spent over $500 on this system which was reviewed in Popular Mechanics, May 2014, fairly positively. I would rip it out now if it were not for the $500.
BOTTOM LINE:
1) They need to get the connection and reconnection of devices down to simpler and quicker means. Bluetooth would be dead if it worked this poorly.
2) In the desire to be very simple, they have made it too simple. There are not enough tools to know why the device is not connecting (e.g. signal level, retries, ...) The sole tool is a spinner in green-blue-yellow.
3. The system is too opaque as to where the data lies. I still do not understand the relationship of my hub to the Smartthings website. Seems they should be able to restore a system. Maybe the sole purpose of their website is to get my data onto the internet and so that I do not have to fight my ISP for IP address changes, etc. that makes seeing stuff at home difficult when you are out and about.
I hope they are able to improve in the future.
May 2014 · Electronics · verified purchase