Hi all, new here - great to see the amount of community support and happiness with the Hubitat product. !I've experimented with Fibaro HC2 in preparation for a big house build & HA. I was happy enough but saw the dissatisfaction with HC3 and lack of Zigbee support so did some more research and ended up here (just ordered the Hubitat + some Zigbee bits and bobs to get going). Great to see that Zigbee products are available at much better costs than ZWave.
Anyway, here's my dilema - The house is about 3500ft spread over 4 floors - mostly the structure is concrete floors and heavy concrete block walls so not great for wireless solution without some planning I guess. I need to finalise the electrical design to get the 1st fix started and am not sure about location of dimmers/relays for lights: centralised on each floor in a small cabinet on DIN rails vs at switch locations. some switch locations will have 4 or 5 circuits so would mean trying to locate 4-5 dimmers which may be a challenge!
I'll have a few sockets, motion sensors, repeaters if needed scattered around to help with comms. With a centralised setup per floor I was thinking I could locate a hubitat near that location so for the most critical element of my HA I'd have a robust setup. This approach would also allow an easier swap out if ever that may be needed.
Would appreciate any info on this as I may have overlooked things that I'm not aware of that could be important in making this decision.
What country are you in? You measured in sqft so I’m assuming US? There’s not much your going to find in the US that is DIN rail based outside of industrial stuff. Concrete will cause some issues, however having devices spread around will probably be better than centralized to give you a stronger mesh setup. I’d recommend just putting zigbee switches in and forego these DIN cabinets. It also gives you options down the road when 20 years from now those cabinets don’t make sense due to advances in technology and could make it harder to upgrade (I’ve seen this problem with people who had high end older Lutron stuff). Speaking of which, if you have the budget, I’d 100% recommend Lutron over Zigbee or Zwave for lighting. You definitely won’t regret it.
Thanks - should have said - I'm in the UK - we've been forced to live with a combo of metric & imperial so house is about 320m
Lutron may be nice but I have no idea on costs or how to deal with that. With Zwave I tested out some retractive switches as well as some touch ones - both with dimmer2 modules behind and can understand how to set that up - though of course works out expensive. With Zigbee I could maybe find acceptable switches with built in Zigbee but controlling LEDs I'd like 0-10V units so I can control a bunch of LED drivers so may need to stay with regular switches and smart units behind/elsewhere.
so house is about 320m
