Just got the Hubitat Elevation hub and needed some advice with how to migrate off ST.
I have both in the same room, about 2’ apart. Will this cause issues while I migrate all the devices/rules/automation off ST?
Is there a documented how-to for this or is it a matter of removing device from ST, discovering in Hubitat?
Hey there,
I don’t think ST to Hubitat distance is a concern. You will need to exclude each device, all at once or one at a time before you can pair them with Hubitat. In my case, I did one at a time and it was a pain b/c ST kept picking them back up.
Now, distance from the new device and Hubitat, that could be more of an issue. Some have said 1-2 feet, while others have said distance wasn’t an issue. For me I had some ZWave devices that were 30 feet away with no issue, while some had to be 2-3 feet. Most Zigbee devices had to be very close.
Suggest you have a long Ethernet cable to take the Hubitat on the road with you to each device
Good luck and welcome
Rick
Just for another data point, I have mine about 6” from both my ST hub and WiFi router and haven’t run into any issues. My zigbee channels are pretty widely separated from the WiFi channel, and I have the ST hub and Hubitat on different zigbee channels.
I had zigbee devices split between the two hubs for several days with no noticeable issues. I’m not sure how Z-Wave handles different meshes in the same wireless spectrum, but all of my Z-Wave devices also seemed to work fine split between the hubs as I migrated those over the course of a day.
Regarding distance from the hub, there were only a couple of devices I had to physically move to get them to pair to the Hubitat. In general, I unpaired things from ST from most distant to closest, then paired with Hubitat from closest to most distant.
Best practice recommendations to avoid potential interference (which could lead to lost messages) would be to have the hubitat hub at least 3 meters from any other device transmitting in the same band, whether it’s a SmartThings hub, a philips Hue bridge, a WiFi router, a Vera hub, or whatever.
There are plenty of people who do have multiple transmitters very close together and operate without noticeable problems, although they may be occasionally losing some messages and not know it, but if the issue is enough of a problem to impact operations, you’ll notice it then. And then you can move them further apart. So it’s up to you whether you want to start at the recommended distance or not.
The second issue is simplifying the migration. Best practices for that would be to power down the SmartThings hub and all of its Z wave devices while you are adding new Zwave Devices to the Hubitat, whether they were originally paired to the SmartThings hub or not. This isn’t about interference, it’s about keeping the devices from getting confused about which network they are going to. (Note that this recommendation only applies if you are manually moving individual devices over to hubitat. If you are using any kind of controller shift method, then obviously both controllers have to be active.)
I think fewer people follow this recommendation just because fewer people are aware of it, and most of the time you won’t have a problem. But it’s how most field techs would do it if controller shift was not available, just because the alternative can be getting into a situation where you have to totally rebuild both networks.
My apologies if it’s obvious, but is there a controller shift process for ST->Hubitat?
No, SmartThings doesn’t support most of the optional advanced zwave controller management features, they really didn’t want people to be doing that because they can’t do the same thing for the zigbee side. @csteele has a method which uses adding one as a secondary to the other, so that would fall into the same category.
Download the Hubitat app
