I got Hubitat on the recent Black Friday sale and so far I'm loving it. I have a dozen or so test devices on it and it's working like a champ. It's so nice having things locally, but then having "just enough" cloud for those situations that require it. It's not the most beautiful thing in the world in terms of UI, but when it comes to home automation I'll take function-over-form 8 days out of 7.
My question is how does this handle larger installs? I have about 100-ish devices left to migrate over from SmartThings (about 75% of them Z-wave and most of the rest are Zigbee) and my one lingering concern is that it's going to bog down once I have gone though the trouble of moving everything over.
I have what I believe to be the latest (C5) hub. Who else here has a larger install (100+ devices) and how are things holding up? If it continues to work for all of my devices as well as it has for my test devices I'll be very happy. I might even purchase a couple more hubs as backups.
Lastly, keep up the good work Hubitat team!
You'll find experiences all over the place... Some people put a lot of devices (100+ isn't impossible, and has been done by a number of people) on one hub, whereas many of us split our devices between multiple Hubitat hubs on purpose (installation flexibility, reducing outage scope if hub crashes/is reboot/etc, improve speed where there are a lot of apps or rules present), etc.
Also note that standard (non-plus) zwave can be problematic in Hubitat. Since zwave standard doesn't report status automatically in most cases, you have to poll the devices (in an app or in an RM rule) which chews up a LOT of zwave radio bandwidth and hub wait time. Many people have not had good experiences with a more than a handful of standard (non-plus) zwave devices on Hubitat.
The number of devices will slow it down some, but nothing compared to how many apps/rules you have configured. If you like a lot of very complicated, granular rules on all of those devices, then yes it may get slow in the end doing it in one hub. The only recourse in that case would be less rules/apps, or multiple hubs connected with something like HubConnect.
Yes you can restore a backup to a new hub... However just note that only works well for zigbee. Since zigbee devices have a hard coded MAC/ID when you re-pair them to the new hub they keep the same identity so rules continue to function as expected.
For zwave when you you re-pair everything any devices used in rules/apps become invalid (as the device gets a new address when re-paired, as far as the hub is concerned it is a new device) so the rules all need to be updated/re-done (not a lot of fun).
So a "backup hub" isn't of much use if you have a lot of zwave devices you use in apps/rules (in my opinion).
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The number of devices is determined a lot by the type of device. As @JasonJoel said, the ZWave devices that need to be polled "cost more" than ZWave Plus devices. Power Monitoring devices, can be VERY chatty. Reporting changes in power as low as one watt. People have reported a single device consuming the ZWave network. Battery operated devices on the other hand must be very quiet and therefore you can have quite a few more -> "Cost Less" where "cost' is how many device equivalences are consumed. An Aeon MultiSensor 6 for example, has, as it advertises, 6 sensors. Temp and Humidity, are both values that change in small amounts normally. If you have it set to report often and it's USB powered, it can get quite chatty too.
So there you are.. LOL.. at one extreme, one device is the limit, and at the other (battery door sensors) can have more than a hundred.
I would say in general however, whatever number you have working on SmartThings will work on Hubitat. The problem is that after using Hubitat for a while, you want to make all those adjustments to your Rules that just weren't worth it on ST. That's when you find yourself wondering if a 2nd hub might not be a great idea.
I have 51 Zwave devices and 0 Zigbee on one hub, 26 ZWave devices and 22 Zigbee devices on a second hub. I've split them as "upstairs" and "downstairs" and organized them to have all the Rules they need on the 'same hub' for performance. All the "outward facing" apps, like Amazon Echo, Chromecast, Weather, etc. live on a third hub.
@JasonJoel , and @csteele,
Thanks for the very well thought out responses, guys. I really appreciate it.
Things are mostly working (aside from occasional cloud-related snafus) on SmartThings, but I will randomly have a device become "unavailable" every so often and have to "replace" it even though it hasn't changed. So it sounds like I'll mostly be okay on Hubitat as well with the potential to vastly improve reliability if I divide things up and get an additional hub or two.
The cool thing to me is that I can divide things up among multiple hubs which would be impossible or at least very clunky on SmartThings. I love that I can just sit down at my Laptop with Hubitat and manage everything. Trying to do everything via the SmartThings app on my phone is painful.
Thanks for the heads-up on the z-wave (non plus) status issue. I don't rely much on z-wave switch status so I think I'll be okay there. I also don't have much in the way of apps or complex rules so I'll probably be okay on that front as well. But, like you said this might encourage me to get more carried away so....
Anyway, thanks again guys. I'll report back after I get some time to do more migrations.
FWIW, I have gotten up to about 150 Z-Wave devices (all but two of them are Z-Wave Plus, I think) on a single Hubitat Elevation. The system generally works well, though there are a few small, peripheral issues that I haven't fully resolved.
I have a bunch of power-metering devices, and I would absolutely echo the recommendation to limit how often those devices report power usage to the hub. I generally eliminate periodic reporting or set to the least often that's available and then rely on reporting based on change levels (greater than or equal to a certain number of Watts or a certain percentage of last-reported power level).