Concerns about the size of Hubitat Elevation

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I’m going to start along the exact same process today. Hoping it goes well. BUT, I have a question… my house footprint was too wide for the old wink hubs even wink hub 2’s… I ended up having three hubs in a triangle formation spread around my house.

This habitat hub is so small, the sensors must be really tiny inside. So, what must I do, both during setup for far away devices, but also when running it in the house afterward for those same devices?

Multiple hubs?
Aeotec Range extenders?

I’d prefer not to have multiple hubs if possible because that had its own set of problems on wink when one hub would go down and sometimes randomly crash. Having it all on one would be nice, just wondering how to setup with a large footprint…

I’m guessing: one hub, multiple range extenders, plug those in next to the hub first and set them up as the first devices on the network, then, spread them throughout the house, say starting 20-30 feet from the hub and in 20-30 foot increments, Re plug them in in those locations, THEN, continue setting up the rest of the devices in the home now that they’ll be able to use the extenders, first by excluding them since wink is down, then, adding them into the habitat network however that works.

Would someone be so kind as to confirm whether this is a good plan or not and if not provide recommendations? I’m aiming for simplicity as much as possible. I have a total of 100 devices in my network if that helps, including sensors switches, motion, everything…

Thanks so much in advance for anyone who can help!

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Generally speaking a single hub should suffice but it depends on a bunch of things like the type of devices you have, the location of the devices, whether or not they are repeaters, type of construction/layout of location etc.

In my experience with my clients a multi-hub configuration by location for a scenario like yours could help reduce potential issues from the outset.

The keys to success are:

  • Read up on building a good mesh.. as @brad5 pointed out
  • Make sure each hub has a hardwired connection or use something like MoCA or powerline adapters.
  • Keep rules for devices paired with each hub local to that hub as much as possible. Doing this provides some function separation if any one hub experiences issues.
  • Use the built in Hub Mesh capability to handle device sharing between hubs - use for more global rules, single dashboard etc.
  • Exclude then Factory Reset devices before pairing.
  • Use this community as a resource but understand we are all doing this on our free time and love of all things home automation.
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Are you mostly Zwave or Zigbee? I've found that the C-7 Zwave antenna/radio isn't as sensitive as the radio on my SmartThings hubs. There's a whole project and thread about people installing an external zwave antenna and have had lots of success. Zigbee on the C-7 works fine for me and I don't notice any difference over other hubs.

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Can you start by listing all your devices with the following details:

  1. Manufacturer
  2. Model no.
  3. If known, indicate whether they are zigbee or z-wave or z-wave plus

It is possible that with carefully constructed zigbee and z-wave meshes, you can get by with a single hub.

P.S. @coreystup is correct - many of us have observed that highly-responsive z-wave and zigbee meshes with Hubitat require well-positioned routers. So mesh design is certainly something to pay a great deal of attention to. And remember, there's more to antenna design that just size. Small antennas can also be used well.

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Thank you so much for your response. Really appreciate it. I will read up on it. Hopefully I can contribute too once I understand this well.

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All of my zigbee/zwave devices operate from a single HE centrally located in a 3,750 sq ft home with lath and plaster construction. It doesn't get much worse for RF than lath and plaster. For comparison I have 5 commercial-grade APs to provide wifi coverage in the same house (plus two for outside areas).

Many of us use purpose-built hubs in addition to HE. I have a bunch of Hue hubs to support various Hue devices (some of which require their own hubs - sigh), a Lutron pro hub for Caseta switches, a BOND hub for wireless RF fans, and so on. I also have a couple of extra HEs but they support pesky LAN integrations, not zigbee or zwave. I keep them separate just because they are all running custom community-supported code and they tend to be pretty inefficient. Their zigbee and zwave radios are turned off, and they sit in an equipment shelf in the basement. (And yes, I am throwing hardware at what is really a software problem, but I'm lazy.)

Hub mesh is pretty cool and can definitely make things easier if you go the multi-hub route. One thing to keep in mind, though - there is a practical limit of about 200 shared devices per hub. That is, one hub ideally will not share more than 200 of its native devices. That really should never be an issue unless you did what I did and got lazy - shared every device on the hub instead of being more tactical about which devices really needed to be shared. Fortunately it was easy to undo!

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This is going to be a really Dumb question and I apologize for that, but what kind of devices use signee. I don’t know that I have any zigbee devices. Most of my Devices are Z wave. For example most of my devices are simple wall switches made by Leviton using the Vizia RF. They were the original Z wave light switches and dimmers. The technology is ancient at this point, but those switches were 80 bucks apiece back in the day and I won’t replace them until they are dead.

Now I do have many temperature sensors, window sensors, motion sensors, locks, fire alarms, sirens, water valves etc. No idea if they are zigbee or not?

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There's a ton of overlap and you can usually find the same or similar functionality in both. Not always, though! The smoke alarms and water valves I've seen are zWave.

One thing to be aware of... pre-ZWave Plus devices may require extra attention. I am fortunate to have only zwave plus devices so I will let others speak to it, but I believe it has to do with older zWave devices not reporting status unless polled. There's a polling app for that purpose.

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Thank you for your reply!

I have

  1. Schlage smart locks
  2. Vizia rf light switches
  3. Leak smart water shutoff.
  4. Kiddee smoke alarm
  5. All the motion, window, door, water, and temperature sensors originally included with the wink hub and some additional that I had bought.

I’ll try to get model numbers later but was hoping this light help to jumpstart.

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If you can list your devices by manufacturer and model, many of us can help you figure out the radio protocol that you use.

The truth is that these switches are not going to give you a good user experience on any modern z-wave hub. Being z-wave, it is likely they will have to be polled, which in turn eats a lot of radio time.

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Probably z-wave.

Z-wave. Consider replacing these with something newer (or replace them over time with something newer).

Zigbee

This uses a special Kidde radio that no other hub has. Either replace this, or incorporate it into Hubitat using this device.

Were they quirky devices or Wink devices? The Wink devices were mostly z-wave. The Quirky devices were mostly zigbee or direct-to-WiFi.

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Ok understood. Thank you for your reply, I don’t plan on adding any devices as I pretty much have everything I need on my network, so it’s good to know the hubs can handle double what I currently have.

One thing I am noticing is no one is commenting on the idea of a single hub with multiple aeotec range extender 7’s.
I’m just curious if this is a bad idea or won’t help my problem or if anybody has any thoughts on that. I would like to get away from multiple hubs if possible, because then I have to get an hub linking and sharing devices, and I’m trying to reduce complication whenever necessary.

I’m glad to hear that your habitat is able to go through that kind of environment, that gives me hope! I am literally getting my habitat out of my mailbox right now, so I’m excited to peel it open and see what I can do! Factory resetting every single device in my house is not going to be fun! Grr…

One gentleman did propose the idea of a better Z wave antenna, an external antenna for the hub, does anyone have any recommendations for a good antenna to help extend the range of the habitat Z wave? Would that help?

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When you look at the Hubitat compatible devices list, be aware that this is only the list of devices that HE has actually tested. There are plenty of others that will work just fine with generic drivers, and there are still more for which someone has written a community-supported driver. In other words just because it isn't on the list doesn't mean it won't work.

A single hub with multiple repeaters works well for many people. I personally like the Ring extenders for zwave better... but that's just a personal preference thing. And don't forget any line-powered zwave or zigbee device (ok, maybe not those switches of yours) should work well as a repeater too - zigbee lightbulbs excepted.

Should you ever get to the point where you want to replace those old switches, consider Lutron Caseta as an option. They're extremely reliable and the integration with HE is local and bullet proof. They do require a separate hub but in my opinion well worth it.

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I think I had a mixture of both, just not direct to wifi…

On the smoke alarms, they are in the wink hub so at least one radio in that system talks to it unfortunately.

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Ok. That’s makes sense. Historically I have had pretty bad latency with wink. Sometimes turning a light on and it taking 20-30 seconds to come on. After many wink hub updates they were working great, but I always hypothesized that the latency was due to network congestion on the zwave network. Also, historically, wink would show a light on that was off or off that was on, etc. It has gotten far better over the years but I know originally the polling wasn’t possible because of some Lutron patent which is obviously expired because now it’s pretty accurate and so are other hubs nowadays. I do suspect though they are old and do need to be polled. Can anyone recommend the best polling app or is there just one?

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This will require cracking open your huba rn soldering on a new antenna. There are people here happy to help, but I wouldn’t reach for that modification as an initial step unless you’re comfortable with voiding the warranty on the hub.

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There may be more than one but there is a built-in app on HE that I think most people use. Just go to apps and click on "add a built-in app." It's at the bottom.

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The other issue with older Z-Wave devices is the older routing schemes can bog the mesh down. Polling can impact resources on the hub as well.

Again this is why I prefer a multi-hub arrangement in this scenario - you lessen the potential impact of these things by splitting them up.

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I'm a multi-hub proponent. Before Hubitat, I cobbled together multiple hubs into a system. I got my first Hubitat hub and worked to discard the other hubs. Eventually I got it all working on one Hubitat hub... I doubt that it was even a month later that I added a 2nd Hubitat to 'split-the-load' I had found the Hubitat hub to be excellent but got concerned about the one basket/all eggs problem. I decided to split my home's ZWave devices across two hubs... upstairs and downstairs. What a boost that was. :smiley:

It worked out that I pretty much as if I had two apartments. There was no overlap between and each hub was independent... for a while. Til I added a 3rd hub to be a 'coordinator' and manage all of the non-Z-devices, like weather, Amazon/Alexa... all the internet facing products. :smiley: But that really cried out for some hub-to-hub communications. I'll skip over all that history and just get to the Today image:

HomeAutomationAsASystem

Four hubs (a fifth for Development) all interconnected and have yet to have a crash or failure. I've purchased 8 Hubitat hubs on this journey so far and retired the 3 oldest (one C-3 and a pair of C-4s)

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I wouldn't worry about that. They aren't like zigbee/z-wave, where they're locked to a controller and need to be reset.

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