As of today, I have completed my migration from SmartThings which I used as the hub of two different homes over the last 8 years! I’ve been a Home Assistant user for the last couple of years but up until now, it used to be a secondary hub with SmartThings running my ZigBee and Z-Wave networks as well as most of my core automations. There were many reasons to switch but it was the last one on this list that finally pushed me over the edge:
- Internet outages making my smart home useless
- SmartThings outages doing the same
- Slow and clunky mobile app
- Deprecation of the original groovy platform that powered webCoRE and most of my critical automations
Overall, the migration went pretty smoothly and it only took me about a week with a couple of hours spent per day moving ZigBee and Z-Wave devices over as well as updating/recreating my automations.
The only painful part of the whole process (and the reason why I’m posting in this topic) was the migration of my Z-Wave network. It was so tedious that I almost gave up on several occasions. Here are some of the major issues I hit and had to deal with:
- Before I could start re-creating the network, I had to update the firmware on my Aeotec 700 series stick which took a very long time (and failed on Windows so I had to do it on one of my Raspberry Pi’s)
- On countless occasions, Z-Wave JS got stuck searching for devices and the only way I could fix it was by restarting the Add-on (and waiting a while for it to come back up again); on a few occasions, I even had to completely reboot my Home Assistant Yellow device
- On many occasions, the Z-Wave devices I paired dropped off the network and couldn’t be remotely controlled even after trying to re-interview and heal them; the only solution I found was to remove and re-pair them (which was a pain because I had often put the switch covers back on blocking access to the DSK codes)
- Some of my Z-Wave devices are a lot less functional when paired in Home Assistant that they were in SmartThings; for example, my GoControl garage door controller doesn’t expose an open/close sensor, setting up codes on my Z-Wave locks has been a nightmare, etc.
Given how well most everything in Home Assistant works and the praise I had heard for Z-Wave JS, I was honestly very surprised by how painful this part of the migration was; especially when compared with the super smooth process of moving my Zigbee devices over.
I’m starting this thread mostly to understand if I had a one-off experience here others have run into these issues too? Should I be worried about the long term stability of my Z-Wave network? Is there something I could have done better (e.g. used Zwave2Mqtt or a different Z-Wave stick)?
