Building a Strong Mesh - Wired?

I am looking at a solution to build a strong mesh on a large commercial premises. Hoping to have Hubitat sat in the centre with range extenders / routers connected in a spider which would then communicate with devices in each "zone".

The challenge I am facing is the premises span 100m on 4 storeys, so I don't think wireless repeaters are going to be able to build a strong and reliable mesh. and even if they could it would require a lot of them.

I was wondering if anyone had a solution where we could have a wired mesh set up or if someone knew of long range repeaters or routers which would be do the job?

I think the big question is when you say 100M how many nodes are we talking about in that very large area. Are we talking about hundreds of devices, or just 50 scale would be important.

This is a very large structure any information about the construction maybe help someone give you a better clue.

No mater what someone gives you though to help it cold be largely speculation until you try some devices. I would expect this would be a case for some commercial grade zigbee gear and a good amount of it. But more details could be very useful in giving good information.

100M over 4 stories? 25M per floor? Type of construction? Maybe one hub per floor connected to LAN running HubMesh?

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Yeah I would definitely consider multiple hubs for this.. by location. Make sure the hubs are well ventilated and protected from the usual industrial stuff + power backup.. you can run POE if you use an adapter. Do NOT plug the HE directly into a POE port though.. it's against their terms of service.

I would also recommend considering using something like Node-RED as well. It works great as a centralized controller and you can connect to a wide variety of things including various systems that may not directly interface with HE.

Thanks for the help! To provide more details, it is a brick building with concrete floors. Each floor is 100m in length and there are 4 floors. (so a lot of space to cover in total!)

If I was to go down the route of a separate hub on each floor, I am guessing that as they would be connected to our internet router via ethernet, each hub would be connected relatively stably to each other hub.

Could we then use one of the HE hubs as the "main" controller and have the remainder as sort of "dummy extenders" and use the dashboard on one of them, or is that where the recommendation to use Node-RED comes into play, and we use that as the centralized controller? I haven't come across it before, so was wondering if Node-RED has a dashboard?

Also, Forgot to clarify - we are not going to have too many end nodes - around 40-50

Besides the above, it's important to consider what protocols you're using. Since you said "mesh," I assume you're thinking Z-Wave or Zigbee, but there are different considerations for each. Z-Wave has a maximum number of four intermediary hops. Theoretical range is 100 meters, but that's in open air. In a building, I've seen recommendations for repeaters at least every 30 feet (9-ish meters), though if that's a near-worst case, most devices are likely to get more. But in any case, you'll be limited to some extent. Fewer hops is generally better, but Z-Wave limits you to few enough that it shouldn't be a huge deal either way.

ln the future, Z-Wave Long Range (LR) has theoretical range of up to 1 mile and replaces the mesh with a star topology. If all of your devices are capable of being upgraded (700-series devices can be but would depend on the manufacturer to actually provide a firmware update) or you're able to buy LR devices directly in the future, this may work. Hubitat has promised compatibility (assuming you have a C-7) after the spec is ready.

Zigbee doesn't have a practical limit on the number of hops, though I think most repeaters/routers in the home automation space do specify something (generally higher than Z-Wave). Being a higher frequency than Z-Wave and one that tends to be more crowded (2.4 GHz), the range between hops might be less, but the ability to make more hops may more than compensate for the difference.

But I agree with the above that either of these might not work well in a space that large, so creating two or more separate Zigbee and/or Z-Wave networks and integrating them over your LAN (via Hub Mesh or a similar solution) if necessary to meet your needs may be better.

Another idea: Hubitat can also integrate over the LAN with most Lutron systems, most of which might also meet your needs. Even Caséta, their low-end residential system, can do 2500 sq ft (but has a 75-device max). A "full" RA2 system says it can do 5000 sq ft and up to 200 devices. If you feel like paying out the nose for even more, they've got higher-end residential options too, and a variety of commercial solutions that might be more appropriate if your building is commercial, as stated. None of these are cheap, but Lutron has a solid reputation, and so it's an alternative that might be worth considering. Again, it can integrate with Hubitat, though depending on what you want, it can also be a perfectly capable system on its own (though Hubitat can do quite a bit more).

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Yes Node-RED does and a lot of other things as well.. of course you can also have a main HE hub controller and use Hub Mesh to share the devices between hubs.. either way will work. For flexibility and extensibility I prefer Node-RED but sticking with HE is also a very capable option.

Keep in mind with Node-RED you could theoretically (and however unlikely!) change or add different hubs and still keep your rules and such.. You are not tied to just one home automation platform..

Yes, you can use one of the 4 hubs as the main controller. or even a 5th, so that the main controller has no directly connected devices. You could also split up tasks between the different hubs. The dashboard could be run on the main controller.

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