Thank you for the questions @Strom. Best of luck with the home automation. It will make you feel definitely empowered and feeling that sky is the limit when it comes to it. Of course it comes with its own set of challenges.
First here is some advice on setups/option:
- in general I and I think the whole community feels that anything zigbee is better than z-wave in setting up and reliability
- add additional HE hubs around the property connected with wired ethernet to increase coverage and reduce battery drain if devices are too far away from the main hub - I have second HE hub in the basement. This is easy to do with app HubConnect - you can add many slave hubs reporting to master hub and thus expanding system hub points
- in case of garage door contact sensor I have SmartThings V2 contact sensor - but in order to make it more reliable I have also GE/Jasco light switch zigbee so that it can expand the mesh and garage sensor to connect to hub via this smart switch (NOTE: only non-battery powered zigbee devices are repeaters e.g. can expand the mesh). My original post was about smart switch on the garage door opener but back then I did not have the smart switch and the connection to the HE hub was flaky sine it was too far away and through too many walls.
- when you build out your HE hub apps with community apps make sure that you add one at a time and let it "soak" e.g. keep an eye on hub stability for next few weeks before you add another one - this will confirm that added community app is not with issues like memory leaks or other. I currently have too many community apps but my HE hub needs a restart almost every week as it starts to act slow and unresponsive. The remedy for this is to make full backup and reset it and to exactly as I recommend - start adding one new app at a time and test to find out which app is the culprit for the slow down
- if you choose WiFi smart switches for around the property or for any other device type - make sure your router can handle increasing number of wifi devices - some routers can start experiencing slow downs in packet routing after adding only few dozens of wifi devices. I recently swapped from Arris router to Google WiFi and works miracles. Arris router is also modem so I still use it in bridge mode only
- some good places for HE hub community apps are Hubitat Apps and Community Apps
- I think a must have is Echo Speaks if you are invested in Amazon Echo devices GitHub - tonesto7/echo-speaks Echo SpeaksDocumentation
Let me know if you have any other questions
