re: Smart switches and locks for new construction

Lutron Caseta for me. Love it

I've been using GE smart switches/dimmers with SmartThings hub for over 5 years between two houses and haven't had any issues.

Looks like GE has recently introduced a new line that doesn't require a hub too.

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i'm using hubitat
so you are using a hub....

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well yes, the question was how 'local' and 'independent' i truly am with so-called local control.

sure a few scheduled things work as long as they are triggered by other local things but lets face it, there are alot of attractive wifi and other types of devices out there and when you start to mix them...you're going to have to call on the API for that WiFi doodad which means a trip through the cloud; you won't be able to talk to it locally.

you cant even use your hue bulbs locally and there's the damn hue hub, sitting right next to hubitat on the shelf.

thats just the way of it. we all have a mix of cloud & local stuff unless you just RELIGIOUSLY buy only zigbee and zwave and that's not possible.

so long story short, i hate it all. local control is a myth and any type of complex routines is going to rely on at least one web-based hop along the way.

its like my plex server; most of the time it will work when my internet is out but occasionally it wants to 'phone home' and reauthenticate me and when that happens its as useless as anything else.

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something like a Hubitat is well worth the small cost and can easily be set up with minimal tinkering but can really expand what smart tech can be used and what it can do.

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hubitat is ok but invariably you're going to end up coding something that looks like this:





this was a script i set up to start playing some arcade ambient sounds from 1982 (you can pick a year and hear game sounds from that year) when i walked into my arcade and change the lighting.

i probably spent more than a week figuring out the proper code to play a local mp3 served via my plex server on my sonos speaker.

hubitat is great when it works, unfortunately this old man lacks the time and energy to keep everything going with all the rulemachine updates, etc etc etc. anything that works now probably won't at some point.

I think I hit my limit recently when i tried to "pair" three different light switches across my house so if I turned one on or off it would turn the others on/off at the same time.

Finally I threw my hands up because apparently my GE/jasco dimmers were only zwave and not newer zwave+ so hubitat couldn't determine the state change and use that as a trigger. Seriously? Nobody told me not all zwave was created equal.

It was a solid use case. My house is 4000+ sf and my outdoor floodlights are on 3 separate circuits so I have to walk the whole house to each switch to turn them all on. I just want all my floodlights to come on regardless of which switch I happen to be near.

The solution is to throw away perfectly good smart dimmers and but newer ones.

What a bunch of crap.

And before you ask, yes I spent hours and hours down the rabbit hole of trying to get hubitat to poll the switch and determine state change or change a variable when it was pushed but nothing ever worked consistently.