I can rebuild it. Better, stronger, faster.... (but will it work?)

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I'm ready to start throwing money at my setup to get things rock solid. I figure 99%+ of my reliability problems are z-wave related so I want to start surgically removing z-wave like it's a disease.

Here's my plan:

  1. Add a second C7 hub as a dedicated z-wave hub and begin slowly moving my 75 z-wave devices to it.
  2. Replace all in-wall z-wave switches and dimmers with Lutron Caseta (about 30).
  3. Shut off the z-wave radio on hub 1 if I'm able to get all remaining z-wave devices migrated.

My Hue network of lights works perfectly (especially native HomeKit control with Hubitat being the automation orchestrator with Homebridge v2 running everything else) and I hope Lutron is similar.

I figure moving the z-wave devices will clean up all the ghost nodes I can't get rid of (yes I've bought the Silicon Labs stick, a Parallels license, and a Windows license and I still can't get it to work. Almost bought a Windows laptop just for this before I decided enough is enough).

I just want things to work 99.9% of the time. Does this sound like a plan for solid reliability?

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I understand that over ~50 Z-Wave devices can be a problem. As you migrate to the new Hub, My recommendation would be to see if you can migrate half of it to the new hub. See how this works and maybe re-build the other half on the existing hub. I have seen others that split the house in two (Ex. A hub per level or per side of the house).

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Hmm... is this official? I'm currently above 50 device and in the process of adding a bunch more with no issues. But if tis going to be problematic that isn't going to go down well with me

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I also have above 50 devices. I think the “official” number is around 232, but that somewhere over 50, issues can start to arise, especially when trying to send too many commands close to each other - Bandwith issue…

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Good suggestion. This will be a gradual process and maybe things will improve dramatically before I get to the planned end state.

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Ya. I know 230 or around that is a zwave limit. I'm also very picky about disabling all the useless reporting that devices do (especially with power reporting) so I keep my mesh fairly clean. I can see after 50 devices it becoming a problem if you dont do that. There are a lot of chatty devices out there by default.

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Hello.
Well, as I and (it seems) everyone knows, Lutron Caseta devices are the most reliable, most dependable switches/dimmers out there. And, Pico's are everyone's favourite button device.
However, the style is not for everyone, and the cost is much more than every other switch (especially if you figure in the SMART Bridge PRO).
Also, the Telnet interface from Hubitat to Lutron is rock solid. It just works.
Please note: at one of my installations, I just replaced all 6 Lutron Caseta's with Enbrighten Zwave devices. Why? Client hated the style.
By the way, the Lutron Caseta stuff can show up in HomeKit in two ways:

  1. Lutron to Hubitat to HomeBridge to HomeKit
  2. Lutron directly to HomeKit
    I found that both ways work very well, but method #2 is slightly faster.
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One thing I've done before migrating to a C-7 is put in a skeleton framework of repeaters first. If you do this then you can actually install your devices in reverse order (outermost to closest to hub) ... this will allow you to maintain both meshes and rules temporarily.

One thing to be careful about as you remove devices it can mess up your existing (old) mesh..

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I have about 70 zwave devices, pretty solid mesh. I do occasionally get "zwave busy" messages but things seem to be working just fine otherwise.

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