I truly appreciate the dedication of the folks in this community. I have asked a few questions in this forum and have been delighted with the very quick, friendly and helpful responses I've received.
That said, my Hubitat has never really functioned as designed. Given how happy most people are with their experience, I have to assume it is something on my end.
I have hundreds of man hours and well over one-hundred z-wave dimmers, switches, relays, sensors, etc. wrapped up in my system. I am willing to pay for individualized, personal troubleshooting.
I don't need fancy. I just need reliability. I cannot live with a system that kind of works, most of the time.
I'm not aware of a premium support offering, but if you're having Z-Wave reliability problems it's likely to come down to a mesh issue. If you want to post a screenshot of your Z-wave details, I'm sure you'll get lots of advice.
I am by far not an expert on Z-Wave but I when I moved from Smartthings (there not having any Z-Wave problems) to Hubitat, I tried plug-in Z-Wave repeaters to improve the mesh and for me it did not work. I think the v.3 Smartthings hub uses a 500 series Z-Wave chip, but I am not sure. I have a C-7 Hubitat which use 700 series chips.
What worked for me was a second hub on a different floor. No Z-Wave issues since! YMMV. Every location can be different. My house is 3,100 sq/ft with devices on all three floors, in the garage and some outside.
With the second hub zigbee is not turned on and all of them work great with using just the 1 hub (mostly because of a stronger zigbee mesh, I guess).
This could be the reason why your hubitat has not functioned as designed. With this many devices, the hub's z-wave radio can easily be overwhelmed depending on how frequently your devices report (i.e how chatty they are), as well as their generation.
For example, I still have a couple 100-series z-wave devices on my network, which communicate at 9.6 kbps with the hub. I make sure that these devices are not power-reporting. Otherwise, they would bog the mesh down.
If you have a large mesh (100+) of devices that report frequently, it would be advisable to consider turning down device report interval, or splitting the network into two.
Hubitat doesn't offer premium support but as you pointed out, this community is a great place to learn how to manage your home automation system, without feeling as it's becoming a second job.
If you ask questions and provide pertinent details about your struggle, here in the community, you will receive advice from staff or other users that will surely help you make the best out of your system.
I have several hundred devices split pretty evenly between ZWave and ZigBee on a single hub. A good staring point would be to post a screenshot of your ZWave devices page so we can get an idea where the problem might be. It's usually pretty obvious to us after working with people on here.
I’d add that at one point I added several Aeotec repeaters in an effort to boost speeds. But they actually had the opposite effect. So yes, ratchet back on reporting and see if you really need the repeaters.
I had Aeotec repeater for more than a year.
Neither ZWave Device was using this toy, so it was removed.
Now I have two community favorite Ring V2 repeaters for almost 8 months.
One is still doing nothing but second one is used only by 1 single device.
Also I have many line powered Switches and Plug-in Outlets.
These are also a repeaters (should be a repeaters).
One of the line powered Switch is actually acting as a repeater for few devices.
And this is it.
I am very disappointed to see this non-repeating picture.
But my ZWave mesh seems to be in a good shape (I think).
Everything is working near 100% of times.
When I look at my mesh, stuff doesn’t go through the repeaters just because it’s going directly to the hub. So I really found that decluttering my mesh and minimizing logging improved my throughput and responsiveness.
Based on the feedback I received here, I did a thorough review of my system. Due to the size, layout and construction of my home; the number and type of devices on my z-wave network and the apps/routines I'm running, I decided to purchase three additional C7s. Two of the additional C7s are hardwired to my Ubiquity US-48 port switch. The other is connected WiFi (beta).
The layout/placement of the four C7s very closely mirrors the layout/placement of the four Ubiquity U6-LR WAPs around my property. There are now 30-40 devices per C7.
I haven't finished migrating devices from the original C7 to the new/nearest C7 (I assume excluding the devices from the original C7 and including in the new/nearest C7 is the best option). Once I have some experience to report, I will update this thread.
Do you own a Usb Zwave stick? If so and you haven't done so already you might want to put it on your network and go through your Zwave devices to see if you have any ghost's.Compare the Usb stick list to Zwave details. With over 100 devices and man hrs there's a good chance you might have some Ghosts that Hubitat Zwave details aren't showing. Also check if there's firmware updates for your devices. I use a few Aeotec Repeaters and they never repeated either. I updated the firmware with the Zstick included them again did a zwave repair and now they are repeating for many devices. I actually have too many repeaters now since I bought Ring repeaters to replace them.
I do own a Zwave stick. In my home, there are ~120 Leviton zwave switches/dimmers. Several are connected to hardwired 3-way, 4-way and 5-way switch applications. The way that Leviton handles those circuits is to have only one zwave device per circuit (even though all switches on the circuit are Leviton zwave).
The setup works perfectly in all locations. However, by the nature of how the circuits are configured, it resulted in 29 ghost nodes on my network. I was able to manually remove all the ghost nodes thanks to the solid write-ups I found in this forum. I have checked recently and have no new ghost nodes.
I was not super aggressive in using the zwave stick to update the firmware on my devices. I will put that on my list of projects to do soon.