I've been using a C-4 hub for several years, no real issues to speak of. We are in the midst of a move from a 2300 sq ft single level house to a 3400 sq ft 2 story house with a detached 1600 sq ft shop, located about 50 ft from the main house.
I've disabled / removed all of the automation at my current home, with the idea of starting over fresh at the new house. All of my lighting I've converted over to Lutron Caseta, but I am still using a lot of zigbee and z-wave battery-powered sensors (motion, contact, leak, tilt, etc) and a handful of z-wave outlets. House will have 2 z-wave thermostats (I'm hoping there's a c-wire so they will act as repeaters, but I'm not sure yet), and a separate z-wave thermostat in the shop. Also planning to use z-wave garage door controllers in both the house and the shop.
I'm wondering about range of my single C-4 hub with a relatively "thin" mesh, vs getting a new C-7 for the main house and putting the old C-4 in the shop to have two separate systems, that I could either run separately or maybe tie together using Hub Link or Hub Connect or something like that. I'll have a wifi mesh satellite in the shop with ethernet jacks available.
Looking for experiences and/or recommendations of sticking with a single hub vs setting up separate hubs. Thanks!
Since you are using two hubs, you can connect your house devices to one hub and the shop devices to the other. You will need a LAN connection between the two. Since you have Ethernet jacks in the shop, you are all set. You can connect the C-7 hub to the C-4 hub using hub mesh.
With hub mesh, both hubs should operate seamlessly. With hub connect, one hub would be assigned as the master (presumably the C7) and the other would be the slave (C4). That would be required if you were using a Hubitat as the master and Smartthings as the slave, but with two Hubitat hubs take advantage of the built-in capabilities for mesh.
I've got a detached garage probably 100 ft. from the house (wood construction with vinyl siding...no steel). Only powered zigbee devices out there, but I didn't have any issues with signal. The only thing I did proactively was put a repeater (smart plug) on an exterior wall of the house that faced the garage. No Z-wave out there yet, but I do have a ZEN17 smart relay that will make it's way there eventually. If I get time I'll try it this weekend and share the results.
My recommendation is simply to have one powered repeater in the garage and one in the house on an exterior wall close to the garage. I wouldn't expect any issues this way and no multiple-hub costs or setup issues.
This is the time not to skimp - a hub in each location tied together with a good LAN. If you have a question mark now about bridging that distance, you will always question it. Z protocols are not designed for big distances and asking them to do it just puts a weakness in your network you'll be concerned about every time a hiccup happens!
Is there ethernet between the 2 buildings already? Powerline might be an doable option for very little. I've a customer with a gate about 1/4 mile from his main house - we used engenius point to point wifi for 2ct of 2.1MP cameras and a call box. $300 and it's worked for years!
I don't think there is hard wired ethernet between the shop and house , but I have a Netgear Orbi wireless mesh setup, and am planning to put a satellite router in the shop....hopefully that will be good enough to mimic a hard wired connection.
I have the same scenario, I went with these. One on the back of the house and one at the shop. My shop is about 200' behind the house. This puts the shop and the house on the same network so I can use hub mesh. If you have a separate network already in the shop then you will need to go with Hub Connect I think. I never used it to link across separate networks but supposedly it can.
I tried a power line connector as the shop power comes off the same feed as the house but it wasn't stable. It was just too far I guess.
It may very well. I originally was just using one of the CPEs set in repeater mode. Basically a wifi repeater that can be set outside. I have a netgear router in the shop and wifi was pretty good, but would drop from time to time. I get about 150Mbs at the house and was getting about 10 to 20MBS with that setup. When I added a second at the shop and aligned them for maximum signal I now get about 75 to 100Mbs at the shop and it's really stable.
50' is a big distance? I know there are walls involved but my experience says this distance shouldn't be an issue.
At that distance I would agree that a more powerful signal would be helpful. But he's only looking at 50'.
Mesh networks were literally designed so that that low power devices could cover larger areas without needing dedicated network controllers or a wired backhaul route. I'll reiterate my advice to give your existing equipment a shot and see how it works for you. If it does, spend the money you saved on more devices. If it doesn't, go ahead with another hub. I just want you to know that the "spend more money" solution is not your only option.
I'll make sure and get my ZEN17 tested tomorrow (including measured distance... my 100' estimate may be an exaggeration) and post back. My zwave mesh has far fewer devices and will certainly be a better test.
You're right, I don't need to have it figured out ahead of time...getting stuck in the mentality that I need to be ordering equipment now, when I don't really need to. I should give the existing stuff a shot, and if it doesn't work maybe we'll see a Labor Day sale on the C7 hub that I can take advantage of. Thanks!
Since the distance between the house and shop is only 50 ft, it might not be difficult to run an Ethernet cable between the two buildings. If you do, be sure to use a cable suitable for direct burial. You can bury it, run it through PVC conduit along the ground, or run in overhead between the eves of the buildings. If the mesh networking works, splendid. If not, there is an alternative.
The hubs should not care if they are connected through Ethernet cable or by connecting it to a jack on the WiFI mesh devices. Remember though that wired Internet tends to be a lot faster than WiFi. Mesh networking devices tend to be inefficient due to the overhead required to maintain the mesh.
My shop is about 500 feet from the house, so it's well beyond hub range. I have a hub there, "meshed" with the hub in the house. Works fine and I seldom access the shop hub unless I am installing a new device.
Just as a note from my own experience, I have a detached garage about 50ft from my C7, 35ft of that is through open air, the other 15ft includes a layer of brick and 2 walls of thick rock lathe from the late 20’s (probably about an inch thick if I had to guess).
A zooz Zen16 relay just barely connects directly to the C7 from there with a -3db RSSI and refuses to route through a repeater that is as close to the external wall of my house as possible. It sometimes acts up and doesn’t immediately respond to commands. I have a S0 Yale lock (should have bought the zigbee module…) in the garage, that I had to pair in the house as it wouldn’t fully pair from the garage and failed during the config, failed when trying to sync all 250 lock codes (249 of which were empty) with the dreaded zwave network is busy error. Also have a HomeSeer flood light sensor outside the garage, that occasionally doesn’t properly report status changes (sensor reports off when still on).
All that to say, hard to know how well things will work till you start setting up. The word of RF is hard to predict and while 50ft doesn’t seem like a lot, you could still have issues.
Now my setup works probably 80% of the time and I’ve been living with it for the last 18 months, so even with some issues not the end of the world, but I also typically don’t get all that annoyed if things don’t work perfectly 100% or the time.
Now I am going to be running some conduit out there in the near future for Ethernet, I’ll likely end up picking up a separate hub to run the garage zwave devices (we’ll see now the hub does in an unconditioned garage in the northeast summer).
We have three buildings, each wood frame with no major obstacles such as metal studs and such, although each has a metal roof. They are about 50 feet from each other. I initially tried everything I could think of to get a single z-wave hub to work, and found it totally unreliable. I went with a separate hub in each building, NOT connected into a mesh, and it has been great. I do use two z-wave repeaters in each of the two larger buildings, to help ensure that (really helps).
I find that these three separate systems (house, studio, office) are easy to manage by just having three shortcuts on my phone. Each hub has a reduced workload, and the traffic on any one hub or z-wave network is minimized. Easy, simple, solid. My two cents... Good luck!
A northeast summer should not be a problem. If you lived in the southwest where temperatures can get above 110 degrees F (43 degrees C), that might be a different issue.
Of course, depending upon your specific location, northeast winters might be an issue. Battery powered devices do not play well when the temperatures drop below 0 F.
I live in northern Illinois. We have seen temperatures here range from minus 28 degreees F to around 100 F. Fortunately, both are unusual.
I'm in South GA and we have some pretty hot summers, not quite as bad as AZ, but I would think putting a hub in an non climate control building in summer would significantly shorten the life of the device.
Before switching to HE I was beta testing a system that ran off a RPi and that first summer I had no AC in the shop's office. The system crashed pretty regular that summer and it had been rock solid all winter. My shop is well insulated but it would get up into the mid to high 90s in the office. I put in a portable AC unit in the office and that seem to fix it. Although it was limited testing as soon after adding the AC I switched to HE. I now have the AC unit controlled by a harmony hub and I keep the office at 80F, So I have never ran the HE hub without climate control.
I have a uninsulated storage building and the temps in there get up as high as 120F and it's under some pretty good shade, so I imagine in AZ it could be much worse.
Sometimes the debating back and forth in your own head is the worst part, so at least that is settled! And you'll get all the "new" features of the C7 as a bonus.
Anyway, I did test my system out as well. If nothing else, I needed to know how well it would work for my own purposes. My shop is 90-100 feet from the house depending on where I measure, so my estimate was closer than I thought. My only z-wave device on that side of the house is a Zooz dimmer on an interior wall...probably another 8' and a less than ideal angle to penetrate through.
When I tried pairing the Zen17 from the shop it wouldn't pair. So I brought it into the house, paired it, and took it back out to the shop. It did work, but not reliably. Probably about 50% of the time it wouldn't respond or the state change wouldn't make it back to the hub. Then I put another z-wave device (a spare ZEN16) near an exterior wall in my house, at the closest point to the shop (still ~90 ft. away and through two 2x6 exterior walls). Now it works reliably 100% of the time. I'll likely replace my makeshift repeater with a hard-wired device of some sort, but I'm happy with the results.
. Just ordered a C-7. Thanks for sharing.
