How hot is too hot?

I have 2 hubs, got the second while thinking I might install it in an out building. But, then I remembered it gets very hot in that building in the summer (central florida). The building is a shed which is closed most of the time. It has power and ethernet and some amcrest cameras operate out of it just fine. I also have a 4 port ethernet switch which seems to work fine. I just don't want to kill my hub.

Good question.

I would be skeptical that will work, but I have had (very repeatable) issues with heat and my hubs, so I'm gun shy. In my cases simply putting the hubs on top of a luke warm switch on an open air shelf was enough to make both a C-5 and C-7 lock up repeatedly (stopped immediately after taking them off that switch, and putting them directly on the shelf)

While Heat is not necessarily good for electronics, I suspect your lockup was more electrical noise/interference than heat.

My rule of thumb is if you can touch it without yanking your hand away it should be OK for your hub. This will be ~ 50°C

This is not to say there will me no shortening of life but it will be minimal.

The real killer for electronics is varying temperature.

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And in my experience, high humidity.

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The floor will be significantly cooler.. If this were MY issue, I'd look at putting the hub on the concrete floor to get as much cooling as possible and then protect it from physical disaster, stepping on, pests, etc.

For me, in warm Southern California, I have my garage POE switch and Hubitat Hub above head height.. and it can get to 115 in there in the summer. No problems so far BUT they are also in free air so the cooling is not hindered by anything.

In other words, maybe you'll find that a foot off the floor is all the help it needs. :slight_smile: More popularly expressed as: YMMV :slight_smile:

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Hmm, food for thought. The shed is a wood structure but near the floor may be a bit cooler. I also have a concrete shed next door, could run a ethernet wire over there, it tends to stay much cooler and does have a concrete floor. BUT the concrete walls will diminish the signal more.

Floor is cooler but may be wetter. Moisture can be worse than heat.
Perhaps get a temperature/humidity sensor and stick it near by. When it reaches 60 °C find a cooler spot.

I have a C7 hub, measured the body is only 3 - 4 °C above the room temp.

Who knows. The hubs are sitting 2mm next to the same switch they were sitting on top of before. But it isn't like I've measured the EMF around the switch to see if it is spewing noise.

And I'm with you. I've experienced lockups which are much more likely attributable to heat than EMI.

I had my C4 in a closet with my Hue hub, a media server and networking equipment. Ran fine in the winter, but come spring & summer, it locked up regularly.

To be fair, that closet got quite warm, and had effectively zero air flow.

Moving it out into the loft area on a table eliminated the lockups. More airflow, lower ambient, better stability.

Thats enough correlation for me.

S

I would have to agree with you. I would have though the hardware design was more robust, but perhaps not.

To be fair, that closet got quite warm, and had effectively zero air flow.

But the other devices kept working ( I assume).

So now I know not to discount thermal environment as a functional problem :slight_smile:

Yeah...they did. The media server was no doubt the biggest contributor of heat, and in all honesty was both better able to handle it, and least likely to show the effects...however I expect I took a couple of years off the life of the RAID array...lol

The Hue hub and the Zwave Toolbox that were both also in the closet handled it fine, as did a couple of Pi's. But, I think all things being equal otherwise, the C4 with it's two radios and a much heavier processing load than any of the other devices in the closet suffered the most.

In a normal rooom environment with some air flow, the C4/C5/C7 should have no issues. Restricted air flow...well that's asking a lot.

I think the Hue hub has some significant advantages on this front becaue Philips built a single purpose device that does a very limited set of things, whereas the Hubitat team are using a more general purpose, less task optimized platform.

So ... in general, the Hub should handle fairly high ambient, with the caveat that it needs some air flow. As I said in another thread, I wouldn't put it in a box outside in the sun...lol....or in an airflow limited closet with a Media Server crankin' out the BTU's right next to it....well, I wouldn't do it AGAIN for sure anyway...:slight_smile:

S.

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