A call for solidarity and support

I'm at 3 active hubs currently, though one is empty. I'll figure out something to do with it eventually/

Before HE, and at another residence, I had a mesh network that expanded outside and to a detached garage. I pushed wired internet to the garage through a powerline adapter, but was never able to reliably get the Z-Wave network to respond. I attempted to accomplish what HE does through remote hubs with a second hub, but was never able to get the two to talk to each other. I was using Wxxx hubs at the time, and added a home built HS pi hub. HS also does this through their HS net Z-Wave hubs (also based on RPi and I bought one, but was never able to build a second myself and get it to work with the internal radio. I also wasn’t ready to change my W network over to HS.

Bottom line is I can see many applications in larger residences or detached applications where you don’t want to expand and create a large z-wave mesh network. but rather link two separate networks though a wired internet interface. This allows the networks to function together on a common user interface.

In my case they were controlling outdoor Christmas decorations and patio string lights, some distance from my house.

Planning to buy a second one, once the electrician finishes wiring my cottage, so I have something to plug it in to. :slight_smile:

Also doing a lunch and learn with some of my colleagues to show off the benefits of Hubitat.

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one each in two residences. both working fine.. just bought a backup c7 for playing with new devices and as a spare.. This time i will set it up immediately as i never did my c3 and now it a paper weight as it cannot be activated.. considering the price of the hubs versus all the devices not the end of the world.

Did you contact support regarding getting your C3 activated ??

ya they tried couldnt get it working.. no image on it .. and the download apparently no longer works.. and the maintenance interface even though answering was also too old.. was one of the original units.

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maybe someone can tell me if i can join the stick that came with it as a secondary contrller?

I’m on the fence as to whether to purchase a C7 (I have the very first gen hub)... I see a lot of posts indicating issues .. suggested that Hubitat provide a consolidate update on what’s been fixed. I suspect I’m not the only one who is “on the fence” but unsure whether an upgrade is going to cause problems...

Appreciate there is probably a lot of”noise” on the forum - it’s difficult to parse through that and figure out whether I should continue to wait or pull the trigger...

A single post indicating what issues remain (if any) would help and to see that updated with a running log of issues closed / open would be so helpful.

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I would say you will likely have issues although some have had better experiences and some have had worse. It depends on your devices etc and how you go about migrating your network. I think waiting to see what happens in the next update might help if you are uncertain.

I took the plunge even knowing that there would likely be some glitches and there certainly have been. I am confident based on past fixes etc that most of the glaring stuff will get worked out though. The upgraded Z-Wave chipset and ability to migrate everything to a new hub from a C5 or greater are nice features.

One thing you might want to do if you haven't already is pick up an Aeotec Z-Stick. Very helpful in eliminating ghosts and pairing stubborn non S2 devices.

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I have an older Z-stick S2 from my Homeseer days - is that usable in eliminating ghosts?

Thats what I'm using.. the one with the 500 series chip. Also have a UZB 7 but havent done that much with it yet.

I own 3 Hubitat, two of them fully managed remotely... :slight_smile:

I don't need another hub, but appreciate what the hubitat developers and community have created here and wanted to support it. My son in-law is relatively tech saavy and already uses Alexa and some Wifi devices, so I purchased a hubitat and some zigbee/zwave devices for him. From my POV it was a win-win. Hubitat got a sale. My son in-law got a hubitat. I think he will like it.

Holidays are coming up so think about friends and family members who might enjoy owning a hubitat!

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I have to ask... where is the breaking-point where multiple hubs actually causes MORE overhead?

Let's say you have the following hubs:
1- Only Zigbee devices
2- Only Z-Wave devices
3- Only LAN-based devices
4- Dashboards, complicated automations.

To avoid losing any functionality, you'd need to use HubConnect to share ALL the devices in a 4-way pattern. Technically-speaking, any time you add HC into the mix, there SHOULD be 4x more overhead, in this scenario. It seems like 99.9% of the time, a single hub is the better approach, and the only reason so many people have multiple hubs, like I do, is because we ran into all sorts of slow-downs, crashes, etc, and it's very VERY difficult to troubleshoot.

I don't think you'll really reach that point because with each hub you add it adds more compute power. I agree though for simplicity sake, a single hub is far easier to troubleshoot.

I guess that depends on how much more processing power it takes to send ALL of the device data to 3x other hubs? I'm genuinely curious. Heck, sending/receiving HC-based device data might be less, or even more-intensive than native devices. I have no idea. I just know that I had so man problems with my hubs due to mostly chromecast devices, that I bought a hub just for those, and slowly expanded it to other risky automations.

I'm all for supporting the company, for sure, but it just feels weird to promote a bunch of extra hubs, when HE themselves say that is wildly unnecessary. If HE released their own branded products, or something else I could purchase from them, I would do it in a heartbeat. Stockpiling hubs just seems silly.

Well at some point you need to look at what you're doing and why its causing so much load. There are often multiple ways to go about something and I often see people doing things that they know are the wrong/inefficient/complex way to go about it but do it anyways because it makes sense to them or whatever.

That makes me wonder... if it's better to have 100 RM rules with a single trigger, versus like 10, with complicated trigger sets, and setting variable to %device% for if-then-else logic, etc. Sometimes I am surprised how the logic engine works and resulting load.

That being said, it seems that the actual RM stuff doesn't do much to the hubs. Always comes down to apps, integrations, and dashboards. At least for me.

Yes, even better than that would be move them into the smaller apps that would apply to the rule and not use RM4 and keep them simple.

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Depends on the rule and how often it's executing. You can view the hub stats to see what is chewing up your hub and make decisions based of those results.

http://hubitat.local/hub/enableStats (Run this to start stat collection and let it collect for about 5 minutes)
http://hubitat.local/hub/stats (Run this after the 5 minutes has elapsed to view the stats)
http://hubitat.local/hub/disableStats (Run this to stop stat collection)

You can use these links to track down the apps and devices by putting the id's from stats:
http://hubitat.local/installedapp/configure/APPIDHERE
http://hubitat.local/device/edit/DEVICEIDHERE

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