IQ Panel 4 not connecting to Smartthings hub as a secondary Z-wave controller

Great news!

Hey, Did you ever end up getting it working with Homeseer?

Sorry for the long delay, was in South Korea for several weeks. I kept putting off the experiment to completely rebuild my Z-Wave network with the paired Primary/Secondary HomeSeer/IQ4 Panel because several of my Z-Wave devices are old GE and Intermetec devices where the device and the controller have to be within inches of each other to join. Rather than go through all that pain I re-examined what it was that I wanted to achieve by having dual Z-Wave Controllers and realized that I like using Homeseer for automation and donā€™t really want to rely on Alarm.com for that. What I really want is to have status info of my Qolsys System provided to my Homeseer System so I dug and researched ways to do that. I now have Homeseer looking for and reacting to Arm/Disarm emails from Alarm.com so that it is aware of the Alarm System being set or not. Homeseer in turn can communicate that information to Blue Iris so everyone is relatively synchronized! This sync is not instantaneous of course but Alarm.com emails are fairly promt (no more than a minute in my experience) so for my purposes this is all I really need. And best of all I donā€™t need to rebuild and optimize my Z-Wave network all over again with dual controllers!

Glad I happened across this thread. For years now, Iā€™ve been running an IQ Panel 2 as z-wave controller for most of my home automation stuff (lights, locks, ADC thermostat), then I have a SmartThings hub which primarily controls my home theater automation. Qolsys came first, and when I built my theater, I initially wanted to keep everything separate. Kept thinking about moving to ST as primary controller to use some of the extra power, but just never got around to it.

Fast forward to yesterday when my IQ panel had a total hardware failure, so I just ordered a Panel 4, and figured since Iā€™m about to have to go through the fun of rebuilding most of the z-wave network, Iā€™d use this is an opportunity to switch everything to ST and set the panel as a secondary so I could use some of the ST capabilities for more advanced automation. I was quite literally getting up this morning to start resetting all my devices so I could add them to the ST hub now and just need to add the panel as a secondary when it comes. Luckily I just happened to do a quick search on adding IQ 4 as a secondary before getting started only to find this thread. Figured Iā€™d bump it to see if anything changed on the Qolsys side of things.

I assume based on what I see in here, thereā€™s still no hope of adding IQ Panel to ST as a secondary controller, and no update from Qolsys?

It is not an officially supported process in the panel, per manufacturer. I cannot speak regarding ST specifically but this user post above in this thread describes what they did for another controller.

It is unfortunate that Qolsys has not addressed this in over 2 years. I am moving to an 800 series stick and adding some new 800 series sensors.
I guess I will be resetting and redoing the entire network again from scratch.
Home automation is a very real thing for most homeowners now. If Qolsys does not feel the need to support the customers wanting a more robust home automation system outside of the limited, internet based alarm.com . I might need to change alarm panels to a manufacturer who does, or just drop the dedicated panels all togetherā€¦

I understand the frustration when that is the one feature you really want. I canā€™t speak for Qolsys regarding their development/support plans, but I can try to give my thoughts.

The Qolsys panel is designed specifically for use with Alarm.com, so I expect the primary focus to always be on ADC.

That said, a Control4 integration option was developed for the Qolsys panel, and I think the importance of home automation is recognized, with Qolsys maintaining far better internal testing/compatibility documents than other manufacturers I have experienced.

If I remember correctly, official support was dropped for secondary Z-wave controllers during the IQ Panel 2+ years after Z-wave product certification dropped that as a requirement for controllers. I assume the decision was at least partially due to the inability to guarantee results. When it was available there were still compatibility concerns and limitations on all panels that supported it, not just on Qolsys.

I didnā€™t agree with the decision at the time, both the removal of it as a certification requirement and Qolsys dropping it. We made a case for Qolsys to include it again. Iā€™ve come to terms with the decision more, though I would still want it available with the caveat that problems may occur.

I donā€™t want to say this is an indication of a significant direction shift because I do not know how it will play out, however an addition to automation options has been announced in the form of PowerG automation devices. There is a lock, switch, dimmer, and plug-ins which are now supported on 4.4.0 firmware.

Overall performance will be known over time, but there is a significant functional benefit to the PowerG RF version, as they are two way communication, but direct from point to panel with ranges in the thousands of feet, rather than the dozens of some Z-wave devices.