Well my wife and I will be moving into a new house soon and I was wondering if anyone here had some experience and could help me out. My wife indulges my home automation quite well especially with how much I like changing/testing new ideas.
The only thing she will absolutely not budge on is Phillips hue RGB lights. She loves them, they're quick, and color accurate (much better than the Sengled bulbs).
So I was wondering if maybe in the new house it might be more benefitial to run Hue as my lighting all over using Zigbee and then do the rest of my smart home via Z-Wave. Problem is I have never used a Z-Wave device so I'm unsure of their pros/cons.
Does this all sound like a good idea? I'm just afraid that hue might interfere with HE if I use zigbee.
You CAN have your cake and eat it too!!! The HE talks to the Hue hub directly via the local network and controls the Hue devices that way. Also you can always set/change the Zigbee channels in HE to avoid interference with things like WiFi etc..
I used the Hue hub for a while with HE but got away from it - it worked great though. The Hue stuff was just too pricey and I wanted to eliminate yet another hub from the mix.
From my personal experience and lots of reading on these forums, I find zwave to be the most finnicky of all the protocols available. If I would offer any advice I would say do not go all zwave.
I know there are many on the forums who would disagree and have large zwave meshes running well. They will likely chime in too. All opinions expressed are purely my own!
I was going to suggest that you not go with Hue bulbs everywhere. But if that is you wife's wish, then you should do what she wants.
I went with Hue throughout our house when we built it four years ago. Since then, I have found that there are only a few places that we really use the Hue capabilities. In other rooms, ZWave switches are better. Guests know how to turn them on and off and don't turn them off in a way that disables them from working with automations.
It is possible to have it both ways. You can set up a ZWave switch so that it never shuts off the wired power but controls the lights indirectly through Hubitat and Hue. I haven't set any of mine up that way. I would be a little worried that it would be very frustrating on those occasions when the automation doesn't work. When the switch is wired to the light fixture, it will at least work like a normal switch.
Yep WAF/PAF (Wife/Partner Acceptance Factor) is really the critical component in all this. Mine definitely keeps me grounded in reality.
I replaced all my recessed bulbs in our den with sengled color+ bulbs - and while it was fun to change the colors here and there it's now become a forgotten feature. Kind of sad really. My daughter thought it was cool for like 5 minutes.
That's how I feel but she likes to sync them to music while she plans her work. We are also gong to get the hue sync box for the TV (That's my big project for the new house)
You can (as it appears you are) get her input on where color bulbs are desired and rely on smart switches with standard LEDs in other locations. The nice part is you can always add more color bulbs over time if the "need" is there, or even move them around between different locations if desired.
Use zigbee for motion and contact sensors, and locks.
Skip Z-Wave for now, and use Zigbee devices paired to the Hubitat hub on a different Zigbee channel. For example, have your hue hub on channel 15 and your Hubitat hub on channel 20. Then, to avoid any 2.4GHz WiFi issues, use WiFi channels 1, 6, and/or 11 with a 20MHz channel width.
