After Hubitat saved the day at my condo. The building management reached out to me about getting water sensors for the entire building.
They want a similar setup as my condo -> place water sensors around the building and in individual units. In the event of moisture, they can unlock the door (August Lock) with the owners permission and resolve the problem.
The building has 117 units on 13 floors - should I recommend Hubitat? @bravenel @mike.maxwell @bobbyD
How would a centrally monitored Hubitat system work? One Hub per unit? Or per floor with ZigBee repeaters? If each Hub is on an isolated network can they be centrally monitored? Or would they need to be on the same network?
Seems to me that would depend on the size of the apartments/floors, building construction, etc. Also are these hubs installed only to notify management of a water leak? If I had a hub in my apartment that I intended to use for other home automation purposes, there’s no way I would give admin access to my building management. Maybe a dashboard (without access to anything else) or an HSM notification.
You could monitor cloud dashboards from hubs on multiple individual LANs in one place. Since admin access requires LAN access, in that case I suppose you’d be looking at an awful lot of VPN servers running in each apartment that someone logs into remotely. Similar to above, as the apartment owner/resident, I would find it unacceptable to give building mgmt access to my LAN via a VPN. Could the VPN clients be restricted to only access the Hubitat hubs? I guess, I’m certainly not a networking expert.
Does every apartment door already have an August lock installed? Between locks, hubs and sensors for 117 units, this seems like a potentially pretty expensive solution.
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Seems to me that would depend on the size of the apartments/floors, building construction, etc. Also are these hubs installed only to notify management of a water leak? If I had a hub in my apartment that I intended to use for other home automation purposes, there’s no way I would give admin access to my building management. Maybe a dashboard (without access to anything else) or an HSM notification.
Yes, just for water leak. 13 floors with roughly 9 units per floor. The building is concrete. How many hops can a ZigBee network preform? I was thinking one hub per floor and then each unit can have a few moisture sensors with a ZigBee repeater (i.e outlet)?
You could monitor cloud dashboards from hubs on multiple individual LANs in one place. Since admin access requires LAN access, in that case I suppose you’d be looking at an awful lot of VPN servers running in each apartment that someone logs into remotely. Similar to above, as the apartment owner/resident, I would find it unacceptable to give building mgmt access to my LAN via a VPN. Could the VPN clients be restricted to only access the Hubitat hubs? I guess, I’m certainly not a networking expert.
Maybe HSM can just text the management instead of them monitoring? But with the Hub in the unit -> the management won't be able to make any changes or updates easily. So maybe that won't work.
Does every apartment door already have an August lock installed? Between locks, hubs and sensors for 117 units, this seems like a potentially pretty expensive solution.
No smart locks currently. The building is old (1960s) but each unit sells for over a million and association is $1k per month so they have a large budget.
