I've been around here for a bit now. I read that some of our power users have multiple hubs. I have one. Two years here .. one hub. How do you keep things straight? What makes you decide what goes where? What influences your decision to add a second or third ,or even a fourth hub? I understand development, so let's limit this to non development reasons.
Mine was purely to have a backup in case of failure.
I've left all my devices on the original hub and used hubconnect to sync the hubs devices.
I then duplicated all my rules on the second hub and disabled them on the first.
This means all device actions are on one hub and all rule actions are on the second hub.
If one of my hubs fails i can do the following.
Hub #2 fails - enable all rules on hub #1 and everything is working.
Hub #1 fails - load hub #1 backup on hub #2. Re-pair the zigbee devices, move my zwave stick and enable the rules.
All should be working OK.
This is the only reason I have 2 hubs. Back up and working.
Well that's the theory anyway.
I wish I had started using an external Zwave stick. Having a lower heart rate way of recovering in case of a failure would be a preferred way to go.
We have no choice in the UK but it does have its advantages.
I bought my second hub for bulbs. I also was experiencing slowness on my primary hub. I bought a 3rd to move chromecast beta and 3rd party apps. Also I moved a few of my chattier power monitoring zwave devices. Eventually moved almost all rules to the 3rd hub. I still have slowness only on my 1st hub (Mostly just devices now >100) aprox every 5 days. I have setup the rebooter app to reboot 2x a week and this has made everything stable for me (No longer slows).
Have never had an issue on either the bulb hub or the Rules hub. This setup far supersedes the experiences I had prior to Hubitat. I am constantly adding new rules and devices as tings work very well. Honestly I could consolidate back to two hubs, but the 3rd allows me to tinker and troubleshoot.
At this point, two years in as you are, I still just have one. My second hub is purely for beta testing. Although I’ve been contemplating moving the Lutron integration to the other hub to see how it goes. It shouldn’t be the thing that makes the difference, but cause and effect, that’s what crawls to a snails pace between 2-2:30am each day.
My setup by its nature is already split between multiple hubs and bridges, just not multiple Hubitat hubs.
Would be even better if had external zigbee, then all you would need would be the backup. Now that would be reassuring
Zigbee isn't too bad as the devices will be copied across with the backup. Just reset and discover them again and your good to go. Bit of a pain but could be worse.
This is a question I've had since I got my hub...
Z-wave stick, mount horizontal or vertical???
All my Xiaomi devices are on one HE. The other zigbee stuff is on another. Rules are mostly on the Xiaomi one.
Touchwood, so far nothing has fallen off.
I have two hubs.
- first hub has all devices and a few necessary apps. Both radios turned on
- second hub has all remaining apps, mostly 3rd party (mine). Both radios are turned off.
Hubconnect keeping everything in sync.
Rock solid.
There's no reason most people would need multiple hubs (Zigbee bulbs being a notable exception), but I got a second hub to test things on when I was developing apps and drivers and didn't want to risk messing things up on my "real" hub. I also ran some webCoRE pistons on that one for a while after it became apparent that webCoRE was problematic for me until I got everything converted to apps or rules. Now I'm back to using that hub for testing, development (I tried everything in CoCoHue there first), and random experiments (when you see me post a screenshot of a rule for someone, I probably wrote it with virtual devices on that hub).
I eventually got a third hub not for testing. I decided I wanted my lighting automations to be as fast as possible, so I wanted all devices associated with those to be on the same hub where I only ran lighting automations and had a.minimum of custom code. My "main" hub wasn't slow by any means, but it has some chatty devices (Z-Wave power meters) and custom code (AlexaTTS, some LAN and cloud integrations, and whatnot) and I didn't want any of that getting in the way of my lights, the most annoying automations to fail or be slow.
In the interest of still keeping things a bit simple, it's not 100% a lighting hub--it's really my Zigbee hub, and it just so happens that almost all of those devices are motion sensors for my lights (themselves mostly Hue Bridge bulbs, hence CoCoHue). There are some other devices like smart plugs (mostly without metering) and contact sensors (not really worried about those). All my Z-Wave devices, even lighting-related ones, are on the other hub and I've decided that I'll have to be OK with that (all my Z-Wave motion sensors are no longer my primary sensor in a room, and my Z-Wave switches are not time-critical, just something I can use if I want to override an automation or similar).
It gets more complicated: I have more hubs, including a fourth I got when I experimented with a bulb hub as an alternative to a Hue Bridge. Turns out I like the Hue Bridge better, so that one's not doing much anymore.
But...if you're happy with one hub, no need to get more. I think there are a few different reasons some people have more than one (and I have more than one reason and therefore more than one "second hub"), as you can see.
Not a bad way of describing the multi hub situation.
I think a lot of people fall into that description, and perhaps don't appreciate how distributed "Home Automation" can be. It would be wonderful if there was the One Hub to Rule Them All.. but til then, I'll mix and match to get the results I want, today.
I seem to have lost my 'fear' of discarding favorite Tech, long ago. Would I be sad if Lutron had a change of heart and allowed their ClearConnect inside a Hubitat, thus obsoleting my SmartBridge PRO?? Not at All. I would be willing to put that lil' beaut in a place of Honor near my StaplesConnect and Wink.
Shouldn't appreciably matter. It's likely omnidirectional. Having said that, there will probably be a null in the pattern straight out of the end of the stick. So don't point it right at something you want to connect to!
In all honesty, it probably makes no real difference what orientation you put it in.
S.