Hi,
I just started working with the hubitat bridge and I connected two hue bridges which I can now control through Alexa.
I want to connect 4 or 5 hue bridges total with a total amount of hue light bulbs between 180 and 240.
Can Hubitat handle that?
Wow! That is a lot of Hue bulbs!!! Is this a residential or commercial application?
Residential.
The big issue has always been that the hue app does not allow multiple bridges to be controlled at the same time. So we tried the YETI app which slowed to a crawl under the load.
I highly doubt anyone has tested hubitat with that many hubs/lights.
I would be very skeptical of it working well, regardless of the written response you get. That is a LOT of signal noise to weed through, unless these are really far apart / geographically dispersed.
The hue bridges are dispersed to 4 sides of the house. What if I only discovered the hue groups in Hubitat. Hubitat would just send out one command to each hue bridge correct?
Yes grouping will definitely help, but 240 WOW!
I know. It is actually a really good friend of mine. I got him into the hue bulbs and he decides to change all the bulbs in his house after seeing my lights ( I have 70 on two bridges ) All lights show up in Alexa but only one bridge can be controlled at a time.
SMH but I am trying to get him going.
Once you have them setup in HE you can use the Alexa or Google Home integration to control them via voice and bypass the limitations of the stock Alexa/Google integration.
As of a few firmware updates ago, Hubitat was updated to handle multiple Hue bridges. I can't imagine anyone has tested this with more than maybe two or three, but theoretically it shouldn't be a problem. 
People certainly have Hubitat running with that many (or more) devices, though usually a mix of Z-Wave and ZigBee with maybe a few LAN devices. If you don't need to address the bulbs individually, using Hue Groups might ease some LAN traffic, as would keeping the polling interval as low as you feel comfortable doing (if they're only controlled from Hubitat, you can actually just disable it or keep it really low just to be extra safe).
However, a non-Hubitat concern is ZigBee congestion. You'll have 4 or 5 ZigBee LL networks for Hue, and (unless you only use Hubitat for LAN devices and go stickless, disable ZigBee, or only use the Z-Stick version) a ZigBee HA network for Hubitat, and you'll likely also have a 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi network and possibly some Bluetooth devices in the area--plus those of your neighbors if you're not rural. All of these work in the 2.4 GHz range, and so you're likely to make those frequencies quite congested. (That being said, I've had three ZigBee networks plus Wi-Fi at some points, plus who knows what from my neighbors, with no noticeable problems.)
There are also bulbs that connect directly to Hubitat. Really, any ZigBee LL bulb (including Hue) should be able to (they fall back to the ZHA profile Hubitat uses if a ZLL network isn't found to join), but I wouldn't actually recommend that for two reasons. First, unless your Hubitat ZigBee devices are all bulbs, most smart bulbs are poor repeaters on ZHA devices for (at least) non-bulbs. Second, with Hue in particular, there's no easy way to "reset" them should you want to, say, pair them back to Hue (a Lutron Connected Bulb Remote, no longer manufacturerd but sometimes found on the used market, is one way). However, there are bulbs like Sengled that are reported to not repeat at all, thus avoiding this problem, plus some Tradfri bulbs that are reported to repeat well, though I'm still suspicious. Hubitat can also only handle 32 directly-connected ZigBee devices, so if you use something like Sengled, you'll need lots of repeaters (each of which also has a usually-unpublished limit, something like 4-8 being pretty common, sometimes up to 12... and I think an Xbee can handle more but requires some assembly).
Just some things to think about.
For what it's worth... I'm about pushing the limit of two bridges - I'm currently reporting 103 lights across both of them - and in my experience, more than 50 or so is asking for trouble, particularly as things like hue motion sensors and switches count as devices in various ways as well.
Hubitat is quite happy with both... and by grouping a whole bunch of the lights, and then just exposing the groups to things like Alexa, you can keep the number of actually exposed 'lights' that you talk to down to a manageable level.
Got another floor of the house to do yet... so I've got another 20 or so lamps to add (although some of them are 'B15' fittings, which is a hue non-starter - so I'll have to do something different for them). My guess is that I'll have to stick in another bridge by the time I'm done.
HE is definately the winner so far for controlling multiple bridges. I've tried a whole bunch of other options, and it's definately doing the best so far.
-- Jules
I would love a video of that setup!!
Hubitat will be fine. Dealing with the 2.4 ghz spectrum will be the key to that setup.
A few key points:
1:Make a spreadsheet to organize the bulbs, with each bulb document the location of the bulb, and the serial of that bulb -- ESPECIALLY if it's a pain in the ass to get to.
Hue has gotten significantly better when it comes to removing a bulb from one bridge and moving it to another, to the point where I haven't had to add a bulb by serial in a long time. However, you don't want to test this when that bulb which required a 15 foot ladder needs to be moved to a different bridge.
2: Move as many devices on your wifi network to 5 ghz if possible, and only use channels 6,11 with 20 mhz bands for any access points/routers that you have that will have 2.4 ghz broadcasting. You will most likely need to avoid using channel 1 (or 6 or 11, your choice) so that hubitat will have a open channel to use as it will broadcast throughout the house. Not to control your hue bulbs as that will be done over the LAN, but any other sensors that you are using
3: Do not centrally locate the bridges, locate the bridges with their group of lights and create "zones" for each bridge. You will need to re-use zigbee channels in the house to make this work, and the less interference the better. I'm assuming that this house has ethernet in every room, because if it doesn't it will be a giant pain in the ass to do this, and I would spend $8k on putting ethernet in every room before spending 8k on bulbs.
This is obviously a terrible 2D drawing of a house, but you will want something like this:
It's ok to have a couple bulbs on the edge of the wrong zone, but don't have a bulb that is connected to a bridge at the bottom right sitting at the top left in that image. That one bulb will wreck havoc will all the bulbs in the top left zone, while also not being responsive to the bridge that will need to control it.
4: Use a third party app that has the ability to create light groups. Huedynamic on windows/android/apple is a great one for this. Light groups are just a better version of "Rooms" that you can create with the native hue app -- They're better because you can share lights between groups, while rooms cannot.
Example for that monster setup, I would create a light group on every bridge that includes every lightbulb that the bridge controls and name it "EverythingZoneA", "EverythingZoneB", etc.
I would then create a virtual RGBW light bulb in hubitat, and have those 5 massive light groups mirror it. I would share the virtual RGBW bulb to Alexa and name it "Everything". You could then have your friend say "Alexa, turn off everything" and rather than it taking a minute for every light to turn off in the house, it would only take 3-5 seconds at most. If you have hue color bulbs everywhere you could turn the entire house red/blue/purple/etc in an instant. You could still share individual rooms to alexa as well, but the ability to quickly turn all light bulbs off in the house is useful and rather cool to see in person.
This is also a pretty good way of testing the zigbee mesh and finding bulbs that may perform better if shifted to a different zone, since there might be 1 light in the hallway that just doesn't turn off everytime when you tell it to.
Hi @JulesT
I am trying to connect a 2nd HUE Bridge. But although HE can see the other bridge, I can't import any lights or select any groups.
Can you help me to see how you did it? I am using the latest firmware.
I'm at 10 bridges now, around 400 lights. Google Home was controlling over 150 before I ran into the 6 user limitation. I'm so frustrated with these limitations, I'm surprised Google Home can't do at least 10.
Download the Hubitat app
