My Hubitat C-4 has stopped working

My C-4 Hub has just stopped working. When powered I see that a red light comes on briefly and then goes off.

I can't ping the hub either.

Has anyone else experienced this problem?

We have seen the LED going bad in a few hubs, but the hub would continue to work as expected. If your hub is not working, that may be a hardware malfunction, unfortunately.

Interesting @bobbyd as I had lost my first C-4 to an internal power issue where the Blue LED was flickering and had random loss of response and jumped as fast as I could to the C-7 and seen a few more C-4 reports. I just wonder if a pattern is forming. I did multiple analysis, new power supply checked the voltage on the internal power etc and the only thing I could come up with was that it may be stress/wear on one of the components. Maybe this model is reaching it's end of life due to component failure.

This C-4 is now sitting on my desk and I use it for development only. I watch the blue led fade in and out but it hasn't frozen since I took it out of service and reset it so I can do some testing of apps and device code. The only thing it's doing right now is sunrise/sunset and mode setting and running a few base apps for NTP that mirrors my C-7. I have no Z-wave or ZigBee devices on it and just use virtual devices for testing.

Now, that is interesting. The fact that your C-4 keeps working, is not indicative of a hardware failure, or at least I haven't seen one that had random loss of response and it wasn't related to some kind of software issue.

Interesting this subject would come up today, the last 4 mos the lights on my C-4 have been going off and on and I have been having freezing issues.

Last month it got really bad so I wasn’t going to get jammed up with my wife so I contacted HE sales they had a C-5 laying around that they sold me and then a week later I purchased a C-7.

To get to the point I have the processing power spread out over the 3 hubs each hub handles something different the C-4 has had its stick removed and is relegated as my sever hub which probably wasn’t my best decision well wouldn’t you know my wife wakes me this morning saying nothing in the house is responding I do a check I can get to the C-5 and the C-7 but the C-4 is totally unresponsive, I had to physically pull the plug and plug back in it didn’t restart and boot until after the 8th time pulling the cord and replugging it in.

So I’m in agreement I think the C-4s maybe coming to end of life.

I would also like to say I would be very happy if the HE staff would just consider making a pro hub with beefier specs I know you guys are trying to keep it affordable, all I’m saying is us power users like myself need more processing power and don’t mind paying for it I have 3 hubs now costing me over $300 so would I pay for a pro hub costing maybe $299 so that all I need is 1 hub hell yeah I would. So HE could you think about make a pro hub for us power users it would be of great use to us.

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My C-3 and C-4 hubs have been running strong for over 2.5 years now. I lost a C-5 hub due to a hardware failure. Who knows? :man_shrugging:t2:

Agreed!

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My thought has always been that HE was an appliance like a TV or refrigerator. I do understand that things fail but for this use-case lifespan is very important. Would be terribly disappointed to find that the hubs cannot last past 2-3 years.

In my design engineering days I had to produce failure rate estimates of each subsystem I worked on. I learned early on that a few factors are key to system reliabity: the intrinsic failure rate of each component, the environment (heat/humidity), power on/off cycles (the effects of thermal cycling, inducing creep and cracks in solder joints), total power on hours (ultimate wearout mechanisms), and process induced defects. Power components usually are the biggest contributors to unreliability-- they run hot-- so much so that all high availability systems are designed with redundant power supplies.

As component failure rates tend to follow a 'bathtub curve', they fail at a relatively high frequency in the first several months as infant mortality/process defects take their toll, then much less so at a typically low 'intrinsic' level (with a duration of tens of thousands of hours-- the systems I worked on were designed for 100K hour lifetimes) before beginning to increase again during the 'wearout' phase. High reliability systems take pains to weed out the effects of infant mortality by using screened components (sometimes already 'burned in' to get down the first part of the curve before installation); low cost consumer grade electronics usually rely on the usual 30 or 90 day warranty period to mitigate the effects of infant mortality on customer satisfaction. But some defects, typically process induced, may not become evident for a lot longer... these are usually outliers.

So the good news is that if your Hubitat has survived a year or more, it's likely to keep on going for a lot longer... and if it does fail, the most likely thing to go will be an easily replaced power supply.

My vintage C-3 is also going on well over two years now. It's power adapter did however need replacing; I discovered during a severe storm this past summer when the battery backup kicked in several times due to power transients, each time the C-3 rebooted (before I noticed what was happening it had dropped power at least four times in quick succession-- and its database survived the abuse!). Apparently the filtering in the power adapter could no longer deal with the non-sinusoidal waveform of the UPS. Easily and cheaply fixed with a replacement (which I tested to make sure it ran OK on battery backup).

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