Hub Mesh - House and Out Building

I have an out building with z-wave locks that have less than reliable communication with my Qolsys IQ panel due to distance, number of hops, and attenuation from the metal building. I decided to migrate my z-wave devices from the IQ panel to Hubitat. I bought 2 Hubitat Elevation hubs with plans to have one in the house and one in the barn and linking them using Hub Mesh. The buildings are on the same network via underground hardwired connection. My question is, should I learn the locks for the barn into the Hub in the house or should I learn the barn locks into the hub in the barn?

I would connect them to the barn hub, otherwise they'd still be trying to connect to house hub.

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Like @thebearmay, I generally try to join devices to the logically closest hub. I have 4 hubs at this moment and they are named (in my head) as Upstairs, Downstairs and Front. (The 4th does all the Internet facing stuff.) Thus I want all my Upstairs devices to Join the Upstairs hub. And for the most part, I keep the Rules related to them on the same Hub. My thinking is.. that any outage/failure is going to clearly identify which hub is having a problem because the outage would be upstairs devices or downstairs devices that are not working. It also means that when there's a Platform update and I have to reboot, I can time it so that my family is unaware based on where they are. (Reboot Upstairs when everyone is downstairs. :slight_smile: )

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I’m not sure I like the Hubitat Elevations over my existing Qolsys IQ panel for general Z-Wave control. If there was a decent IQ panel, Alarm.com interface I might stick with Hubitat. I think I’ll just hold out for Z-Wave LR and hope it solves my problem with the losing communication with a couple of my locks that are 75 feet from the house in my pole barn. Hubitat seems like more trouble than it’s worth in time and effort to accomplish what I need (extended range, NOT advanced automation). Thanks for the input. This is the best online community ever!!

If this is the case then you will have to buy a new lock that is zwave LR compatible anyway, why not just buy a zigbee version of the lock now and not have any problems using your current hub mesh plan as zigbee locks generally are super reliable on this platform?

Having a zwaveLR device from my understanding doesn't do anything to help with the zwave mesh so it really depends on personal preference and how long you want to wait to solve the problem since zwaveLR locks aren't available yet and zigbee is.

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