I'm wondering if there are any tools, methodologies, guides, advice...etc on the following (this may take some refining in my question so bear with me)...
Hubitat Hub:
Scope: Single Family Home
Based on hub placement, what are the ways you can see how well the hub is performing in terms of coverage of your smart devices (ie: Zigbee, ZWave ...etc)? Is it as simple as just looking at your ZWave and Zigbee mesh networks to make that determination?
For those of you that had to purchase multiple Hubitat hubs, how did you determine when one hub wasn't enough? Is this mainly to get better coverage for your home for ZWave/Zigbee or to load balance CPU/Memory more optimally (ie: what were your use cases).
What's Driving My Questioning:
When one hub isn't enough and why you would need a second.
Is there a bottleneck for the square footage of a home where a second hub would be required regardless?
I started off with a single hub and was able to cover my 2 story home pretty well. I have plugged-in devices for Z-Wave and Zigbee and they act as repeaters, so this helps with coverage.
I year or so after I purchased my C-5, I decided to update to a C-7 and kept my C-5, so then had 2 hubs. Afterwards, I purchased some devices that were not fully compatible with the hub, but would work under certain conditions. I added those to the C-5 and kept all my supported devices on the C-7. Later, I added another C-7 which I am now using to run my rules, with the other handling all my supported devices.
All my hubs’ devices are linked together by HubMesh and it works very well.
So one (of many, I’m sure!) answer your questions:
When you will want to add hubs will depend on the devices, automations and integrations you have, but there is no fast and hard rule. Likely, if you continuously buy new devices (like I do), you could find at some point in the future that things aren’t working or performing as you’d like and you can try adding a new hub to see if it helps.
Square footage is likely not a bottleneck in most cases since repeaters can be used. However, some people prefer having multiple hub to cover certain parts of the house.
@salieri I have multiple hubs but only one running the house. 5600 sq ft and centrally located with a couple of hundred devices. (To be fair 50 or so are lutron and run via telnet on my lutron bridge so really about 160 z-wave/zigbee/lan devices directly running from the hub) It all runs fast and smooth. Now multiple hubs can be useful in even larger or longer houses where there is signal interference, a hub on either side is a good way to work things then use hub mesh. Some people have multiple hubs just because.
Running multiple hubs if you're using zigbee is a pain because you have to allocate more zigbee channels (if there wasn't enough stuff on the wifi bands already )
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