i have three C7 hubs in a mesh. Works really well and is really stable, especially after i fixed some poorly thought through automations on one hub that made it use up DRAM. Its months between me doing anything to any hub.
I have maybe a dozen or two of zwave devices on one hub (and 6 zigbee devices). On the other two hubs i have 3 zwave and 2 zigbee on one hub and maybe 8 zwave devices on the last hub.
So.. I typically am a member of the "if it aint broken don't fix it" crowd. But i also don't like to fall behind in tech. So at some point i am thinking i should jump on the C8 bandwagon.
Is that point now? Is it stable? have most of the childhood issues been sorted out?
Migration rock solid?
I have three C7 hubs running well. I purchased a C8 a few weeks ago. But, like you, my system is running well at the moment. I wanted to wait until after the new year to upgrade to the C8 so that all of my Christmas and New Years automations would not possibly get wrecked.
I would say that the answer is yes to all of these questions, but in my opinion the C-8 setup is a little more complicated than previous hubs. With the external antennas and adjustable zigbee power output, I had to experiment a little bit with placement and power output to get it just right, but it is nearly 100% reliable for me at this time. It seems like you hardly have any devices on your hubs. Maybe extrapolate on why that is.
This is my personal, humble opinion.
A migration from C7 to the C8 should be no problem.
That is, in general, items that were working well before, will continue to work well.
However, there are differences especially in the Zigbee area. These differences may cause issues when onboarding new devices. It's a different radio with different power, and a very slightly different protocol. (Version 3.0 instead of 1.2).
To add to the advantages of converting is the special ability to pick up Matter devices.
If you don't need Matter, and your Zigbee works perfectly, I don't see a need at the present to move to the C8.
Just don't forget that your best plan is to retain a viable C-7 as your recovery option. Most migrations go well, really well, but once you start clicking Exclude/Include, you're closing off the option to go back to the C-7 and try again later.
Let me see if I can say that via example..
The first step of the migration process is to make sure the C-7 is as clean as possible. For some this will be a process itself. Ghosts and Z-device mesh problems WILL migrate and be a problem on the C-8, so don't migrate until those are fixed. But once you have a clean C-7, migration might take only 15 mins or so. The two times I tried it, it was complete in under 5 minutes.
Let's imagine in this scenario the migration didn't work well, then the first thing to do is to revert to the C-7 and get the home back to full operating mode. Then, knowing there might be a problem, plan to take more than 15 mins and find a time when the home can stand that size outage.
In other words, find out which group you are in: the huge group of people that migrated successfully and quickly. Or the tiny group that will revert to the C-7 and make a post here to get assistance
hot question why do you need 3 hubs? i have over 100 zwave devices and almost that many zigbee on one hub?
I have a large property and the distance is such that when i started i could not get a reliable network from one hub. I started with a single hub in my main house but the signal was unreliable to get to my detached garage. I tried wired switches that repeated the signal etc. but nothing worked reliably. I added a hub in the garage and things became highly reliable.
My pool house is much farther away from the main house than the garage. I wanted to control the lighting in the inside and outside portion of the pool house so i added a hub for that area and meshed it to the core hub for a single place of control and automation. I tried to use a mesh extending to here with a couple of repeating hardwired switches but it just didn't get there reliably (it was intermittent) -but its a pretty long distance to cover. I tried hardwired repeaters as well but they didn't do much for me, i found that hardwired light switches worked just as well (i used the zwave mesh details app to learn more about the zwave mesh).
With the new Zwave LR maybe this would change, but i haven't tried this yet. I have had the three hubs in place for a couple of years and it has worked great so far.
i generally run all the automation on the main hub in the house so i can coordinate everything together in one place and only interact with one hub for dashboards and automations. Works really well and is highly reliable.
The only issue I've found is that the hubs reboot much faster than my ubiquity network after a full power failure which has made the hubs get the into a weird state with the hub mesh IP for remote hubs being completely wrong when they don't get an IP address relatively quickly. I fixed that by adding an UPS to my ubiquity gear as most of my power failures are relatively short (my ups can run for 3 hours). If my main network gear is up and running then the hubitat gear always start up reliably. I use dedicated (assigned via DHCP) IP addresses for my hubitat gear so i don't have to go and look for the IP, but just can connect to it directly when i want to.
I don't have any ghost devices on my mesh. it was actually one of the things i cleaned up with a zwave stick a few years ago and it made my hubitat super reliable. Any other good practices i should pay attention to?
The vast majority of people migrate quickly and easily, so I would suggest you assume yours will also and perform a migration. It's so easy to go back: power off the hub, power on the other hub.
Don't be in a hurry to power on the hub. The Z-devices will want a moment to detect that something happened. Power off one hub, wait a solid minute, power on the other. You really don't want two Z-radios to be on at the same time and you do want the devices to notice. One reboot time is adequate typically, but trying to be as fast as possible seems to me would be counterproductive.
I was only migrating to become familiar with the process, and didn't actually use the resulting C-8 in Production, but it wasn't a whole lot more complicated than a platform update followed by a reboot.
Thanks! much appreciated!
For what it is worth, i have 71 devices on my main hub. That includes a dozen remote hub mesh devices and a few virtual devices. I was surprised how many i have -its easy to expand once you get into it
Just to be extra clear, to ensure radio silence from the source hub you're migtrating from, after you create your migration backup, shut the source hub down and pull power from, don't just shut it down.
Great advice to power the old hub down for a bit before attempting to migrate by powering on the new hub.
I don't plan on using LR for now, i figure i would continue to use the two hubs (garage and pool house) but i would update the main house to a new hub given that this is where almost all automation exists and where the bulk of my devices are connected to.
I was in the first wave of C8 adoptors.My initial migration C7 to C8 didnt go well. it worked, ok, most of the time. but there was always something not behaving correctly. Later, I had a bunch of trouble getting the HomeKit integration to work, and Hubitat replaced the original C8. I again did the cloud migration, and still had all the same annoying issues (but I finally got HomeKit to work). I wound up tearing everything down (thank goodness i don't have a substantial number of devices yet) and rebuilt both the Zwave and Zigbee meshes from the ground up. I do recommend if you are mixing Regular Zigbee and Zigbee 3.0 devices, Include the regular devices first, then do the 3.0. That was the biggest problem I had when I rebuilt everything.
Is Cloud Migration problematic? No. My guess is it had a degree of user error involved, but to what degree? I couldn't say. I can say that since i rebuilt everything, that C8 is now rock solid .. All my Zwave devices (I'm primarily Zwave) are direct, every now and again one device, the temp/humidity sensor in my Gun Safe, will have multiple hops, but even that is working great.
I would say the C8 is stable enough now you could upgrade to it if you wanted to without too much concern.
Just to be clear, the C8 is not yet capable of Zwave LR. There is reason to believe it is coming, but no time line yet.
I really appreciate this answer. As a C-7 owner with a perfectly working Zigbee network and no need/want for Matter devices, figured upgrading was not worth it.
One reboot time is adequate typically, but trying to be as fast as possible seems to me would be counterproductive.
