Look away - I'm just frustrated

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Your experiences are so far away from mine, it's difficult to imagine we're talking about the same Hub. I have 5 of them, as I have detailed elsewhere. I have never setup any reboot thing. I would, not against it, but so far, never had a need. Thus I can't comment on the mismatch caused by a reboot.

I do however, upgrade my hubs pretty often... as in soon after an update is offered. So I can't say my uptime is amazing.. it's a couple of days. But prior to the flurry of a new release, I haven't rebooted since the prior flurry.

I have a largely ZWave environment, 3 hubs with a ZWave radio enabled, But only one of my hubs has Zigbee simply to reduce the expense of routers. I already have enough for the existing Zigbee, don't need double :slight_smile:

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If the hub is randomly rebooting and is on a UPS, the first suspect for me is the power supply…

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I noticed the same issues when I had mine setup to reboot. The Zwave network has to sort itself it every reboot I noticed. I reboot as little as possible and the hub is very stable now. They fixed the database issues.

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My C3 hub used to lock up sometimes, it was hard to track down what was contributing to it. Scheduled reboots seemed to help. But I haven’t had to do that for well over a year. My C7 hub, and perhaps newer platform versions, have never caused similar issues ever since.

Now when my hub reboots after updates, etc, I never notice any issues once it has come back online.

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Same thing was happening to me. I finally figured out that it was the Kasa plug that HE was plugged into (it was part of my power outage handling process). There was a firmware upgrade for the Kasa plug and after that, no more random reboots (so far - about 6 weeks :crossed_fingers:t3:)

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The C7 has definitely been a stable hub for me. I have 3 of them left. Sold one with my house.

There’s a myriad of ways to do things and some of them are just wrong, some are wrong for a certain person, or wrong for a certain environment.

If you want to play with Home Assistant, why don’t you? This project will give you the flexibility of the HA device support, combined with the ease of HE automations.

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I use a lot of different home automation controllers all interconnected by MQTT. In fact I’d call my main system an MQTT one with maybe a dozen different controllers attached via that.

What I would say in my general experience is that only my wired controllers work dependably every time. All my controllers that use ZigBee and ZWave have tantrums and don’t respond as they should from time to time. Hubitat is better than most but not rock solid. Neither is HomeAssistant just as another example.

Personally I have partly attributed this to the number of radio networks I have , my difficult home and even to them being by nature non robust networks. I live with it and I chose other connectivity solutions where possible e.g my lighting is C-Bus wired with 120 end nodes. Many other people will defend wireless mesh networks and have said they do have 100% robust Z networks… it’s just not my experience I guess.

I believe HE is at the better end of most controllers re ZWave and ZigBee. I think the expectation however is beyond the deliverable based on the technology used.

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@jshimota I am really sorry to hear you’ve been having so many issues. Kudos for your patience thus far trying different things to figure it out though.

At this point I am not sure if it makes it better or worse for me to share I have not seen any of the same issues you describe over the past few years with my C3 hub but I can imagine it must feel pretty frustrating.

I am by far no expert but if you ever wanted to hop on a zoom call one night and share your screen to get a second pair of eyes to help troubleshoot with you I’d be more than happy to.

I am sure there’s always some possibility you got some bad hardware or something but more often than not I feel like the double edged sword with something like Hubitat is the amazing amount of control it gives us over our devices and automations also gives us the ability to inadvertently add, modify, or create some seemingly tiny change in any numbers of devices or rules that can throw stuff out of whack pretty easily and often figuring out what that thing is can feel like a bit of a needle in the haystack.

Had some buddies walk me through their personal home assistant setup not to long ago just to see how it compared. It’s come a long way since I saw it last and while I found them to be fairly similar a few areas were pretty impressive.

My biggest takeaway was, because it’s all community maintained I got the sense they seemed to be moving and iterating faster which was awesome to see but I also got a sense that they had to be significantly more cautious about reading all the update notes and updating in general very carefully as it was not uncommon for some updates to break things if you weren’t careful.

Not that Hubitat is perfect in this regard by any means but generally the Hubitat updates have all been pretty solid for me and in the rare instance there was an issue the company has always felt pretty quick to fix them.

In contrast, after seeing/hearing some of my buddies experiences with home assistant and how carefully (or rarely) they installed updates I personally felt there were not enough immediate advantages in swapping right now.

If I lived alone then maybe that would be different but for fear of my wife’s wrath if my automations broke regularly I feel like Hubitat is a much more stable bet for my house at the moment.

Either way, as @SmartHomePrimer mentioned a post or two above, if you have the means and inclination there is little risk in trying HA out for yourself if for no other reason than just to play around with it.

Honestly, if for no other reason, I think the single biggest reason I don’t see myself moving away from Hubitat anytime soon is this weird community where everyone always seems so genuinely helpful and collaborative.

Sure, I’ve seen small pockets of this here and there in the other communities as well but (at the risk of jinxing it), this one seems significantly more positive, helpful, and welcoming to posts by others ranging from super complex edge cases to newbies asking the exact same question asked by 100 other people previously.

That’s not normal and I really appreciate that about this community. So much so that when I do have a little free time I often try to pop in and participate where I can and give back the same way so many others here did so patiently for me when I was starting out.

Whatever the future holds for your home automation journey I wish you luck man. As long as you’re willing to keep troubleshooting different things though I have a feeling there will always be a group around here happy to keep helping along the way.

— and I meant it about the second set of eyes earlier btw. No pressure either way but if you want some company to help look over your rules/device logs just send me a private message and let me know. Even if it’s just to vent — I am sure we have all been there in one way or another at some point. Haha

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Ouch that seems like a terrible and frustrating experience.

A couple of comments..

  • Since everyone's setup and environment is different it's hard to help or offer advice that isn't the usual generalized stuff (build a strong mesh etc etc).
  • I know the system can work well because I have installed several including various clients of mine. I have not had the issues you seem to be having so there is hope.
  • From your comment you appear to have a technical background like a lot of us. This means your knowledge can be a dangerous thing - easy to over-engineer or push the boundaries and cause things to break. When I first started with the HE I ended up redoing my network several times (re-pairing 100+ devices!!) before I figured out the best way to handle things. It sucked and I still find myself getting into trouble every once in a while.
  • For general purpose troubleshooting for odd behaviors - power, heat and network issues.. maybe also interference or a bad spammy device. I had a client with a secondary hub in their garage. Kept mysteriously rebooting randomly. Finally determined it was a portable A/C unit they had plugged into the same circuit that when it came on every once in a while caused the reboot.
  • Home Automation is a lot more complicated than people have been led to believe. There is a lot of squirrelly stuff in the physics of signal propagation. For a fun diversion also take a look at how the Z-Wave network actually works - hint: dark magic. Truly amazing that HE (and other hubs) work as well as they do.
  • I have to admit that these days it is usually my fault not HE's when things are off. I use my HE's (I have 3) as device controllers and Node-RED for the rules etc.
  • I have an instance of Home Assistant running and while very powerful it is also very easy to get mired in technical details once you go deeper. I would never use it for clients due to potential support issues but for my personal use as a companion server to HE for specialized services and testing, sure.
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The database fix was recently wasn't it? I set mine up to reboot to deal with the growing DB issues. I continue to do a nightly reboot and haven't noticed any ill effects. Would you suggest not rebooting on daily basis?

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You might be referring to some updates that occurred to the platform last year. “Database fix” is a bit generic so it’s pretty hard to say for sure what that means :slight_smile:.

I would suggest not rebooting your hub on a daily basis. If you run into problems that need fixing, then work with us here in the community or by opening a ticket with support to figure out what’s actually wrong.

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Rebooting every night and having the Z-wave network re-establish is not good. Brings back the nightly repairs that Vera would do and break my Z-Wave network randomly. All the of hubitat's I support have uptimes over 60 days, some have a complex mix if Z-Wave, ZigBee, and lots of rule machine rules and other are simple. The only reason I can speak to 60 days is because we have had some software updates this fall.

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The most recent database growing issue was fixed in 2.2.9 I think. I have not had a single issue since. I was able to reproduce it on demand and tested it after they said it was fixed. My DB size is stable and I only reboot for updates now. I would say scheduled reboots are not necessary at all.

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I just cannot look away when someone is as frustrated as you are. I cannot say I wasn't in your shoes, because I was, years ago on a different platform. The things I've learned then, from my own mistakes, made it easier to avoid the same problems when I set up my Hubitat Elevation hubs.

I went through every hardware iteration starting with C3 and going one by one, through C5 and later C7. I had the opportunity to use the cloud backup to move from one hub to another, but I always chose to simply start over whenever I moved my home set-up to a new hub. The reason is simple, starting over, every few years with new hardware gives you the opportunity to build better mesh and consolidate automation. My personal set-up consists of nearly 300 devices spread between 2 hubs, and that doesn't count my testing environment. I have a mix of Z-Wave, Zigbee and Lan connected devices and integrations. I use mostly built-in apps but have a good chunk of custom code as well - I don't often use voice assistants, but I can summon both Google Assistant and Alexa, and when I do, they work without issues.

The key to my set-up is that devices and apps running on my home are usually tested on a developer hub prior to deployment. I also introduce new devices individually, or in small batches, so I can observe how they affect existing mesh over a period of few weeks. If I don't see any problems, then I add more devices. The secret to running a maintenance-free home automation system, regardless of the platform used, is to build a strong foundation, so that the layers you add later on don't crumble it.

As others pointed out, everyone's setup and environment are different, so you may say that my personal set-up and experience are an exception. From someone who has handled thousands of support inquiries in the past 4 years, I can tell you that the problems you are experiencing are atypical for the majority of our users. Based on the tickets reviewed, I can share a few common trends that lead to similar poor experience as you described:

  • using untested integrations that have not been vetted prior to deployment by the user or our engineers.
  • using a mix of devices that don't play well together (E.G. Zigbee Light Link bulbs mixed with Zigbee Home Automation protocol)
  • using encrypted Z-Wave devices that don't communicate properly with the hub
  • poorly maintained mesh with devices that often fail to communicate with the hub
  • allowing devices and apps to have unlimited access to hub's resources despite the fact that Logs (past Logs) show events being generated every few milliseconds.

These are just a few examples that would bring any controller to its knees, not only a Hubitat Elevation hub.

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I would take @junk 's offer for a second set of eyes. Something seems fundamentally wrong. It could be corruption of your z-wave database. (not cleaned by backup) It could be corruption of your main database. It could be a bad device in your z-wave mesh and /or a bad device in your zigbee mesh. As said above we can only give you generic answers based on our own experiences. In my case I have around 40 z-wave devices, same amount of zigbee and the rest caseta and don't normally have any issues. Other things that can contribute to mesh issues. Old houses (wire mesh on the lathe), galvanized pipes, metal boxes (not limited to old houses) Overlap of signals (zigbee with other zigbee meshes and wifi) Bad placement of hub, bad networking... soo many variables. Take a deep breath and let us help with one thing at a time. When we get to something that is being a chronic issue we can tap support. They are a fantastic resource as are the community. We can certainly help each other!

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Unfortunately, that is also the case with Hubitat for the C4/C5 models (not full repair, but clean up tasks).

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Huh? More details please! What kind of “clean up” tasks? And what should one avoid doing?

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Unlike C7 where you have visibility on ghost devices, with C4/C5 models you don't, and the hub attempts to remove them for you. Stubborn devices linger in your system and they can create havoc in your Z-Wave mesh. That is something we learned from, and avoided with the C7's new Z-Wave implementation.

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If you hub is randomly rebooting during the day, you've got a major issue. That shouldn't happen.

Alternately, if you've scheduled the reboot during the daytime, I'd ask why. That doesn't seem right.

I have a C-7 with ~25 Z-wave and ~80 zigbee devices, and I never reboot it.

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Hey @jshimota, I feel for you. I’ve had so many issues over the last couple of years so I can really relate. I tried everything and still had persistent issues. Eventually things settled down a lot when I moved all my lamps onto Hue, added loads of repeaters, and moved all time critical rules to Node-Red. It was a stack of work. I clearly had mesh issues. Still now and then I find myself walking into a room and the lights don’t come on, or rules go haywire, the database size goes crazy, the free memory drops below where I know it’s going to cause an issue and my auto reboot rule fires and on and on. I’ve tried HA and it was also a stack of hassle. Whatever else people say, it’s clear to me this technology is hobbyist right now. It will progressively improve I’m sure of that. This platform is hugely improved over the last 2 or 3 years. And Matter should improve the device side and connectivity too. Hang in there buddy :smile:

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