Please Mike reference where I implied or stated that any staff are "ALL Lutron"? I stated:
That most if not all of staff USE Lutron...
There's always been a higher emphasis of support and quality for Lutron and Zigbee over Z-Wave.
Ok... sure. It's just lower on the preference from the primary development staff then. Except for Bryan he likes Z-Wave.
No offense taken here. I get excitable sometimes, but never really take offense unless it devolves into personal attacks. And even then it depends if I give a rat's patootie about the person's opinion that is attacking me.
Life's too short. 
Lol I picture a private staff section of the forums where the staff make fun of us for carrying on..
Only for those not in the office... they just laugh about us openly 
Course... who's in any office these days????
I suppose I was naive about this stuff, but I found out by becoming a moderator on some (non-Hubitat) forums, that most forums have a private staff section hidden from the rest of us.
This is a place where lots of things are discussed. Everything from banning users, to subforum changes, to just chat about stuff that - while not secret - isn't on topic for the forum. Sometimes that place is used to debate and vote on these changes.
I wouldn't doubt Hubitat had one of these hidden subforums too. It isn't nefarious. A place like this needs to have this "secret" forum to communicate with other staff members, especially when you don't have an office, or are in different time zones, different work schedules and so on.
I only worked from home for 2-3 weeks. We've been pretty much 100% in the office since June. Heck I've even started to have to travel for work again already.
I have a mix of both but mostly z-wave plus. I think that is a key thing, I now have 2 z-wave networks with C-7s. One has 8 or 9 z-wave input devices working well now. That hub also has ZigBee LL lamps on it.
The other hub has ZigBee 3.0 lamps and a few buttons. Then z-wave plus devices about 15-20 device all powered apart from 2 device. I'm in a old town house so all the devices are on top of each other with hubs in the middle room up high in a cupboard.
For my z-wave works perfectly, no issues to report once hub was stable. Yes it's a bit of a pain to get there but once it's settled it's as fast as z-wave can be.
Would I prefer ZigBee if they made equivalent devices? 100% I'm always looking for them even though it's working fine. For me z-wave just isn't as good or fast as ZigBee, it's fraught with little niggling and annoying subtleties that I would prefer not to have to deal with. Unfortunately the range of products and capabilities are not matched with ZigBee devices currently.
So does hubitat support z-wave and does it work with HE? Yes, 100 % the question here is z-wave a good protocol to start with compared to others? Nope not in my opinion.
I do the exact same thing 
I haven't been into the office since Feb.
Me fortunately. Hospital didn't close for a single day 
Hmm... I can't imagine why a Hospital wouldn't close... just doesn't make sense 
As the topic says 'Alternatives to Z-wave'.... For me the answer has been wifi devices with Tasmota. I have 27 devices on wifi - on/off switches, fan controllers, dimmers, 3-way switches, color bulbs, and an IR blaster. It takes a little effort, but the majority of these devices were around $10 each. Integration with the Tasmota for HE app has been awesome. I have 10 other devices to still install, already flashed with Tasmota.
Pros:
Cons:
At the end of the day, my Hubitat is for the 30+ Zigbee motion/leak/open close sensors. I've got about 10 z-wave devices and will only replace a few. The point is there is an alternative and it does not break the bank.
Keep in mind unless you're using wifi 6e with wifi 6e capable devices you could potentially saturate your wifi network. I've had to beef mine up with alternate band ap's a couple of times already. I probably have way more traffic on mine than the typical user though.
So the topic should be alternatives to z-wave and Lutron 
I have 3 locations with z-wave, Lutron, zigbee and wifi. Guess which one is my least favorite?
Z-wave is just a needy little child in my opinion. You just can't leave it alone for a day.
Obviously experiences vary. I have >80 zwave devices, and haven't rebooted or messed with my C-7 hub in over a month...
Yeah, that's annoying. While I have a bunch of esp8266 devices, I've never messed with Tasmota at all. I need to / it is on my list for someday. I'm sure after I did one, I would be hooked.
Agree, I figured the peeps in this forum already have a good wifi setup. Mine is Ubiquiti with with an SSID for HA devices.
When you get started, the 'DigiblurDIY' Discord channel is filled with people willing to help with questions day or night. It's really amazing. Great YouTube videos from him also.
I came from an ADT Pulse system (~2010 timeframe, so ancient Z-Wave--by iControl).
The Z-Wave stuff was pretty rock solid--all my things worked like I expected. I just ran into issues with the platform (no cool stuff, all old devices, no enhanced functionality--then, suddenly, I couldn't make updates and 2 months with Tech Support say "delete it all and start over"; so I did. With Hubitat ).
In any case, Z-Wave CAN work fine enough (ADT's problems weren't the radio protocol).
As for this:
Um. Yeah. It would be nice to come close to having THAT problem. My puny $200K (give or take) shack and I are likely to run far from they toys found in $5m houses. Besides, the toys in $5m houses are probably WAY overpriced because, when you're spending that on a house, what's another $200K??
So. I really don't see that Z-Wave is "terrible" per-se.
Currently, with the Hubitat and, possibly, the new 700 series chip, there are some issue. I'm hopeful that the 2.2.4 release will get those resolved to the point I don't have to double check all my lights and locks to make sure they worked. And, the things said so far about what they've got coming give me hope that will be a HUGE improvement.
As for Zigbee, I now have a few buttons and stuff. They seem to work well. And, I like having that as an option. However, I keep hearing all KINDS of issues if you have Zigbee lights involved--as they apparently try to repeat but end up screwing everything up when they do that (so, most of those end up relegated to a second, dedicated hub!!).
As for Wi-Fi: Yikes! I have all my home devices hard-wired with Cat-7 cables whenever possible just to avoid all the mess with Wi-Fi. If I was in one of the $5m houses, my neighbors would be a mile away and out of Wi-Fi range, so it might work OK. Alas, I can see like a dozen other Wi-Fi networks from anywhere in my little shack--so I can't imagine that's a great place for 50-100 IOT toys to battle it out.
Like others my home installation has been running Z-Wave and Z-Wave+ devices for years. Have since replaced all older Z-Wave devices with ZW+ ones and everything continues to work.
The only Z-Wave(+) specific issues I've encountered on Pre-C-7 hubs have been with inadvertently pairing non-border devices with S0, Flaky ZW locks pairing/operation, hardware malfunctions and sadly but most importantly my own ignorance.
For the C-7 it's mostly getting devices paired properly, device firmware updates and S2 device chattiness. Also not really seeing the advantages of the extended range capability of the 700 series chip yet but that stuff for me at least is hard to measure and I have other issues to work through first.
Download the Hubitat app
