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Comment by lozaning | Hacker News Reader

The author of the article should have titled the post, Why I regret going with Control 4. There are any number of more DIY style solutions that at this point blow the control 4 features out of the water at a 10th of the price.

SmartThings or wink hub, some ge z-wave switches, some chrome casts audio's, a google home, and a nest or ecobee 3 thermostat, and this guy would have have been fine.

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Maybe for now, but problems will arise sooner or later when the products get not longer supported or discontinued. Of those things you listed there's a high possibility most of those won't work anymore in 10 years. And you normally build houses for longer timespans and don't want to change basic controls (lighting, heating) short intervals. I wouldn't invest a large amount in Smartthings or Google products for those reasons. The Z-Wave might be one of the more reasonable things, as the protocol and device classes are standardized and most devices are interoperable. But with the so much fragmented home automation domain (there's KNX, Z-Wave, Z-Wave Plus, Enocean, Zigbee HA, Zigbee LL, and dozens of others) it's even questionable how long classic Z-Wave will survive.

SmartThings is Z-Wave and Zigbee compatible. SmartThings is just a hub to control devices that work on those protocols. If you decide you don't like SmartThings anymore for whatever reason you just replace it with a different hub that also supports whatever protocol you've got devices for.

I know. However if you have lots of devices it will be quite some pain in the ass to unpair them from one hub, add them to another and recreate all the rules.

And of course there's always the possibility that the new hub doesn't support the same protocols then the old one. Or maybe it does, but there are some incompatibilities within device support and some of your devices won't work anymore.

As opposed to Control4 and Crestron systems that require $$$$ and a tech to come out every time you want to make a change, no thank you.

Sure, if SmartThings goes the way of Revolv and bites the dust I'll have to buy a new IOT gateway de jour and set my stuff back up, but that's maybe an hour or two of work if you know how your devices work and can read a manual.

SmartThings relies on their cloud setup in order to execute the logic for the smarts you have inside your home. This is why it might take more/longer to get a command to execute. One hub that has all the logic locally, inside it, and that you can program it with Lua is VeraPlus by Vera Control.

The SmartThings has the logic inside too; cloud is just used for setup. I can pull the Ethernet and power cables, and it works fine, triggering my water shutoff valve when a leak is detected.

If you're capable of setting up open hab and know how networking works and can setup remote access it's a great option for the hacker news crowd. I'm all about self hosted, self contained solutions that dont leak data, but the vast majority of people dont want to bother or dont know how to set something like that up.

The price disparity between the control 4 stuff and the Iris, SmartThings, Revolv (RIP), wink hubs, and the like is such that you could afford to replace your controller every year for two decades and still not come close to the same cost.

(NotSo) SmartThings is extremely unreliable. Even simple routines will randomly fail at least once a month. It is fine system for toys, but I would not put it on anything the you care about - like home security.

My SmartThings hub is fine. I routinely test the leak detectors, and have never had it fail to shut off the water and alert my phone. Also have it controlling lights and garage doors, and the scheduling works fine.

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