I finally updated my C-5 to 2.2.4.158, and am now utilizing the hub mesh between my C-5 and C-7.
Other than having 2 hubs to manage devices, are there any disadvantages to running 2 hubs?
Zero
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Twice the electricity?
I run both a C5 for housing some of Z-Wave motion devices (e.g. Fibaro, Zooz, etc) that C7 has known difficulty with the inclusion process.
I would love to have one hub, but having two also gives me flexibility in spreading the load of some more CPU intensive apps and shortening the range between devices and hub in a large home.
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Greater Complexity? More likely something going wrong? Of course when an issue does occur it will be isolated for the most part - Hub Mesh notwithstanding.
Running multiple hubs by location (upstairs/main floor/cloud) was awesome. Am now running multiple hubs by network type - Z-Wave/Zigbee/cloud. The reason I switched was to take advantage of the new ZW radio in the C-7, my Zigbee stuff is on a C-5 and cloud apps/devices are on a C-4. This setup seems to be working well too.
So what you REALLY need to do is 4 hubs minimum - 2 sets (ZW/ZB) per location + a separate cloud hub. You know a "hybrid" approach... 
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I have one (HEATING) managing ALL Zwave devices and also manages ALL the central heating and hot water systems.
The other (MASTER) I use for EVERYTHING else including running zigbee temperature sensors monitoring all the 7 heating zones and radiators.
The Thermostat Controllers, Boiler Switches and a limited number of Zwave devices are meshed with the Master HE.
That way if the HEATING HE plays up the Master HE system can report it and if necessary Hard Reboot the HEATING HE, the Power to HEATING is on a HUE socket - so if BOTH HE's die I can remotely force a reboot through the Hue App.
I'll check the electricity they consume, but would expect combined use less than the Mac mini HA system I migrating from.
Probably depends on your setup / goals too. A seemingly common approach is to use one hub for Z-wave and Zigbee devices to maintain a single mesh for each of those protocols, then to put cloud or LAN integrations on another hub. Some people even go so far as having a third hub dedicated to orchestration (eg. rules), but it also seems like some members have started to split that functionality off into Node RED or something similar.
I have almost everything on my main C-7 hub. On my C-5 hub, I added some the Zigbee and Z-Wave devices that don’t play well with others as well as apps that need a lot of resources. This has worked very well for me.
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thank you all for your responses. i'm actually the opposite of @Sebastien and have most of my stuff on my C-5, and have been using my C-7 for testing
i definitely agree with that logic @KurtSanders, when i was testing the ?Echo Speaks?, it was so CPU intensive (the one that links to the external site), but now that i'm using TTS, it's so much better
I'm glad i finally upgraded my C-5, now i can just use hubmesh instead of hublink and can control the devices
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