Honestly, No - I had managed to get most of my stuff to run locally before I moved to HA. I will say the stuff i do have running so far is much faster. (Except the blinds in the front of the house, which I suspect is a weak spot in my ZWave meshā¦)
Right now Iām honestly still just dealing with the pain of moving at the moment. It takes time to move that many āthings.ā So far, Iāve got about 95% of the hardware moved and Iāve started rebuilding the automations. Iāve still got at least a week of work before everything is back to āparity.ā
Edit: Oh - and donāt need Alarmo - the DSC panel integration gave me everything I needed by default. I donāt need to overlay anything on top of it.
Someone recently pointed out some issues in the way zwavejs heals the zwave network and updates neighbors.
The full network 'heal" can actually temporarily make things worse. The network usually figures itself out in a couple days though. Iāve found healing individual nodes that are slow works better then healing the whole network
A bit late in saying hi on this thread given I moved over to HA in August, but I made itā¦ HI YāALL (not Texan but live in TX so I adopted their lingo) EX-ST USERS!! Good to see you here!
One issue I had with ST, and/or ST forums, is that it was not geared to be too tech detailed. I struggled for years with excessive zwave traffic and related issues. After just a few months on HA I am learning WHY I was having those issues and WHAT I can do to mitigate them. I found some posts on here that were way more helpful than āyou have too many devicesā which pointed me in the right direction.
A couple critical things I learned:
Better to go insecure than use S0 as the latter increases 2 to 3x the traffic.
Get rid of all old zwave (non plus) devices as they will bring down the mesh network speed. If this is true, then I have one big issueā¦ I have 3 non plus zwave locks that would require about $600 to replace. I am currently unemployed so not a good time to make the upgrade, and anyhow, I would either want a 700 series lock or a Matter lockā¦ given how rarely those would get replaced. Neither exist as far as I know soā¦ what do I do? Any suggestions?
The above is basic stuff but even ST themselves never suggested it as a mitigation strategy. All they told me was to tone down Zooz motion sensors, which I did, but my issues remained. Also, the funny thing is that I always started having issues with my mesh once I got to including my locks. Since I work my way from hub out, that usually happened at 40 or so devices. Perfect stormā¦ # of devices and 3 ancient slow locks!
What brand/model of locks are these? I know with Kwikset locks, it is pretty trivial to replace the Z-wave module with a Zigbee version. I did this for my fatherās Kwikset lock, and it works great now. The radio module literally just slides in/out. Maybe you could just get a new radio module, Z-Wave Plus or Zigbee, for your current locks.
Kwikset did a very smart thingā¦ unfortunately my 3 locks are all Schlage BE469. If Kwikset will keep making new radios for their existing locks then it may make sense to replace them with one of their modelsā¦ I am not planning on replacing my locks as frequently as everything else.
If Yale would produce those locks with keyhole and keypad in one piece for euro type cylinders. You know the ones with deadbolt inside and the 9V battery backup options on the outer side bottom.
Europe is wild west from that perspective. Either Nuki, but they dropped the Zigbee support as I can recall. Or Gerda/Yale locks. All with the fitted inside part. Yale at least has the whole cylinder and motor part and you can buy it in bundles, but the keypad is a separate product and everything runs through a Wifi/Bluetooth bridge. (Unless you have those locks where you need to lift up the handle to lock it. That is a nonsense regarding smart locks, if the door is closed, but the handle hasnāt been lifted up before it cannot lock the door automatically. )
Maybe I should ask on the ST forums but I am guessing that most of us in this thread have had this need so here it is:
How do I nuke any API / token authorizations between ST and other services? I nuked everything I could, yet my Harmony Remotes seem to keep pinging ST servers even though I find no trace of ST on the remotes and/or the Android App. I will see if the Windows Harmony app shows anything more however I recall that there was some place where you could kill off any authorizations issued int eh pastā¦
Small apps can continue to run in the Smartthings cloud, even if not visible in your Smartthings app. If you download the Smartthings CLI tool, you can check for these āghostā programs still linked to your account and delete them. I posted about it here with link to get the cli tool.
@Nameless had a post recently in one of the ST topics about Home Assistant vs SmartThings and mentioned some cloud issues on the HA side. I havenāt noticed anything, but I mostly use my phone and app to interact remote, not through Google Home, that has now its own issues. Or generally has its own issues.
So, I wanted to ask here what is that really about, because I cannot believe SmartThings cloud would have less issue.
Otherwise, I wanted to ping @iridris as well, as he seems to be joined the dark side as well.
Yep Iāve been using HA for almost a year now, I think. Iām still using SmartThings, and donāt plan on changing that any time soon. The SmartThings integration seems to be really well built (actually it looks like it is maintained by a ST employee ). The integration also appears to be fully up to date on all of SmartThingsā latest endeavours (meaning no groovy to be found).
SmartThings has been working great for me for Zigbee and Z-wave. I have all of my lighting automations and scenes in ST. And Iām very interested to see how Edge improves things even further. The downside of ST is that it seems to always be in a transition state. Migrating apps took forever, there was the platform change, now thereās the Edge migration. I kind of wish they would just rip the bandaid off for all the old stuff and get the migrations done with.
What I have moved over to HA are some of the more advanced/complicated things, or oddball integrations. All of my Google Home voice alerts are through HA, as are most of my push notifications (because no one else in the family really needs to get the notifications I care about). I am still using WebCore for one area (lock automation) but Iām planning on swinging that over to HA soon so that I can yank the plug on WebCore.
It continues to get worse for me, but itās only the Google/Alexa skills that are the issue. Nabu Casa has identified the problem and should be fixing it within the next month or so. Basically, too much load on a system not designed for this many users. The popularity jumped so quickly that their servers, etc. didnāt keep pace.
I partially fixed the problem by setting up an Emulated Hue for Alexa. Thatās lightning fast. So my Google speakers are still slow, Alexa is working well. And I have way too many of both speakers around my house, so it isnāt as much a struggle now. Always have Alexa in earshot for a voice command.
I am not using too much the Google Home to control devices, only a few of them sporadically. The Philips Hue lights are still going through the SmartThings integration, I havenāt put ant effort into the work to reorganise the Google Home side through HA, and havenāt noticed too much of it then.
Most of the things otherwise runs through automations with motion sensors and remotes, so neither a pain there.
Yeah I only discontinued the SmartThings link when it failed for me. I was moving pieces away to HA and it sorta froze up and nothing was updating. I just nuked it and moved everything then.
I moved everything to HA, but havenāt bothered yet to do the part in Google Home. The Hue integration works really well in HA, and the support for the new switch modules makes it fun to integrate with other devices in HA as well.
Both Zigbee2MQTT and Zwavejs2MQTT works very well and recently a firmware update fixed my pain on the Zigbee side as well, as the IKEA devices have received an update which says
Solves an issue where product become unreachable after a gateway restart.
Those devices caused a lot of headache to me at some point, as my wife was angry about things not working.
The past 4 weeks was without almost any issues, just unplugging a socket to update the firmware after being offline, and somehow the Zigbee dongle was pushed out from the USB port and Z2M stopped working, but after that everything has recovered and working again as before. That firmware update fixed a lot of things.
I will say the stuff i do have running so far is much faster. (Except the blinds in the front of the house, which I suspect is a weak spot in my ZWave meshā¦)
Good to see you here!
