Don't judge me, but I have 5 Hue Bridges in my Network. I also have the Lutron Caseta Wireless Smart Bridge L-BDG2 with 48 Caseta devices hanging off of it. I have 14 Arlo cameras and 6 Arlo Lights. Last of all I have various motion detectors, Aeotec Range Extenders, etc.
Speak to me ol' wise ones! What should I do at the start of this conversion that will save me time and hassle as I step thru the process?
Thanks,
Jack
Welcome to Hubitat!
First thing is you’re going to need a SmartBridge Pro for your Caseta devices if your existing SmartBridge is the non-Pro model. Hubitat uses Telnet for local LAN communications to Lutron, which is only available on the Pro model.
And yes, you can sync as many Hue bridges to your HE as you want. But I am curious why you have 5 Hue bridges. Do you think you need that many? How many hue bulbs do you have?
I have 185 bulbs. Yes, I am a psycho! Some of the bridges were added to provide coverage.
Garage and Office - 35
Upstairs - 53
Downstairs - 60
Front Yard - 9
Backyard - 28
I drive my wife nuts with color changes, motion detectors, timers, etc. But, she likes what I do for Haloween and Christmas.
Will one HE work? Can the system support two?
You could have one hub doing the lot or multiple hubs and by using the built in or custom hub link apps can share your devices to all locations. For lamps it's best to keep them on a hub of there own, rather than mixing them with other ZigBee devices as they don't repeat other stuff very well (that's if your ditching the hue bridges). I don't believe your have any issues with having multiple hue bridges with only one hub.
Multiple Hue Bridges are supported, but with 5 you'd be pushing the limits...
The issue is how hue bridges only publish all bulb states and hubitat has to poll for changes from that entire list of bulbs.
If the bulbs are phillips and not 3rd party, you might want to do a standalone hubitat hub for the bulbs (or 2 or 3) and use something like hub connect to bring them all into a master control hub.
Would it make a difference if all Automations were done in Hubitat so not polling for outside changes were necessary?
Yes, but not as bad. The polling is the biggest issue, no polling no issue. But if you don't use the hue app, or other integrations, might as well just put the bulbs on a Hubitat to gain the repeaters.
Can't hurt to try the hue integration with 5 hue bridges.
Because you can't have ZLL bulbs on a mesh with ZHA devices. Second hub = second mesh. So, you're not gaining any repeaters.
Zll bulbs fall back to zha and are repeaters. Some bulbs are bad repeaters. Putting Phillips hue bulbs on Hubitat will repeat for non zll zigbee devices. Only some really cheap bulbs don't follow zigvee spec and support zha along with zll.
Thanks so much. All of my bulbs are Hue. I do have another 12 bulbs that are connected via Osram. Hue does not have the form factor I needed for my kitchen ceiling.
Based on the comments above, I am not sure if I need an add'l HE. Will I need it to split the load? Network Coverage? Redundancy? I plan on leaving the 5 HUBS in as I have many situations where I want to manually launch a scene or an automation out of the HUE app, or other 3rd party apps.
Based on my testing, it looks like IFTTT can only "talk" to the bridge that I happen to be connected to via the meethue remote access/cloud service. Will HE help me solve this limitation?
Based on @patrick comments above I would go with a 2 HE setup. One HE has 3 HUE bridges connected and the other HE hub has 2 HUE bridges connected. Reason, as @patrick said, is the way HE needs to poll the HUE bridges and the resources necessary to do so. You can interconnect the two HE hubs by using something like HubConnect and you would be able to control all lights from a single hub.
Thx. I take it that HubConect is software than runs on one of both HE devices?
HubConnect has a server part (runs on one HE) and a client part (runs on the other HE) but you can share devices in both directions.
Here is the post that contains all the information that you need for HubConnect
So, now we're saying that it's good to have ZLL bulbs on Hubitat and they should not go on their own Zigbee network? That is completely opposite to every other piece of advice about ZLL bulbs ever given on this forum by any member of the Hubitat staff or any of the community members.
Uhm.... @mike.maxwell, is this the new recommendation? Hue bulbs are fine to pair directly to Hubitat even when you have ZHA devices on the same mesh?
Bad repeaters are bad repeaters, no matter the zigbee profile.
I have all my bulbs, and nothing but bulbs on a dedicated HE hub, this works well for me.
That includes Hue bulbs?
yes, I have Hue (RGB & RGBW strips, Bloom, Living colors and Lux), Osram (RGBW bulbs and CT panels) , Ikea candelabra bulbs and AduroSmart CT bulbs, 23 total so far scattered around 3 floors with one repeater, and the dedicated hub for them in a non optimal location...
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