Hello Community - The subject line says it all . I just received my C-7 and all excited to get started. I did read some initial documentation and watched videos to get familiarized with home automation using Hubitat .
Could you please share the best ( light on wallet ) devices to build the mesh network ? My house is around 2300sq ft comprising of 4 rooms , garage and basement. I plan to keep the hub on the first floor close to the wifi access point .
Appreciate some pointers , tricks and inputs that can get me started.
+1 for the IKEA gear (or their repeaters which I'm using) although they don't have a great range. I've literally got 5 in quite a small house and still the motion sensor outdoors on the terrace drops off time by time. Make sure to locate one near the hub, then work out from there. Stick to devices on the supported devices list on this forum wherever possible to avoid too many issues.
That is great advice. If your goal is to build a solid network check out this post.
Building out from the center is your best bet. It might not be the "funniest" route as some device might just be repeaters that "do nothing" for the humans. However it will give you a great mesh to work from.
Personally I'm trying to swap outlet (in wall) with GE/Jasoc Z-wave and Zigbee outlets. Not super cheep, but WAF is higher than socket outlets. I am trying to alternate 1 zwave 1 zigbee all around my house. Once they are all replaced I should have a rock solid mesh for both system, even as few of the outlets will actually be used for automation (the tree 6 weeks a year, maybe a lamp).
The ikea stuff is cheap for a reason. I wound up returning my ikea plugs, they kept dropping off the mesh. I still have 2 Ikea repeaters and those are just okay, as they stay on but the LQI is on the lower side, but that might be due to my foil faced insulation.
As of late people have been complaining about them, but my peanut plugs have my zigbee mesh rock solid since I installed them I haven’t had a problem out of any of them. I have 8 installed to keep my zigbee mesh happy and all eight are also on upses just in case of power failure.
I've had 5 Ikea Tradfri Control outlets and 6 Tradfri USB repeaters paired to one of my Hubitats for over a year without any of them failing or misbehaving. I had minor issue with the repeaters when the power draw on the USB outlet was at 1A.
Given their wide deployment across four continents, Ikea has probably sold more of those outlets than any other brand of smart outlet. So, while it isn't unreasonable to anticipate that some of them will fail, I suspect they would have been recalled or taken off the market if their failure rate exceeded industry standards.
I have three of the Ikea Tradfri outlets and they seem to work fine. I also have 3 of the Samsung Smartthings Outlets. While the Tradfris will sometimes route 5 items, the Smartthings will often route about 12. They do cost more than the Tradfris. The last two that I bought were $29.00 each. While I don’t think I’ll be using my Smartthings Hub anytime soon (or ever), I do like their buttons, multi-sensors and these outlets. For Z-wave, I have never had any mesh issues, but I have multiple Zooz in-wall switches and 3 of the Zooz ZEN25 dual outlets scattered around the house.
