Great advice chaps. Thanks
I’m kinda wanting to find a good reason for a second hub now. If only for the community kudos 
And hub mesh looks cool.
I’ll checkout that hub resources monitoring tool.
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Oh and can you give me an example of what you mean by a power reporting device? I assume you mean a type of device that’s reporting frequently? Many reports per minute? Like reporting the current draw of a smart plug?
So I currently have 5 zwave smart plugs plus a heavy duty switch. These devices would be putting a much more significant load on the hub than let’s say a motion sensor. Hmmm, hadn’t considered this. Makes sense tho
Sure. Here's a Neo CoolCam power reporting z-wave plug. The TV in my cat-room is plugged into it.
I've configured it to report power levels based on the % increase. Here's what it looks like when the TV is on (red rectangle) or the TV is off (blue rectangle).
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I just bought a C-7 hub to use with my current C-5 hub. I was going to use the hub backup feature to transfer everything to the C-7 and then move some of my old zwave devices (specifically battery powered sensors) back to the C-5 so they don’t slow down the network. Does this seem like a decent idea?? Any recommendations for the execution before I do everything?
I'm confused - your battery powered sensors are going to be on a hub without any repeaters? Doesn't seem like a sound idea.
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Yeah I'm with @aaiyar on that one. If you're going to break things up you should be doing lets say zigbee and z-wave on one, with wifi and cloud integrations on the other. Or wifi on one and zigbee on the other. Without any mains devices to repeat you will have a really bad mesh to go your route. I'd also say battery devices don't really slow the hub down as they don't route, they are edge devices.
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Agree with the others.
I have my Z-Wave devices on a C7 and Zigbee devices on the C5 since it is my understanding the Zigbee radios are the same on both hubs. Splitting up Z-Wave does not make sense unless you plan on using the hubs by location i.e. hubs placed in different areas of your location.
By location is a good way of implementing a multi-hub setup as you can increase range and reliability / resiliency of your system while reducing individual hub overhead. It will depend on your location's layout, construction and general environment (interference) and availability of wired ethernet - wireless generally not recommended, see MoCA or Powerline adapters as a way to extend ethernet without doing a run.
I appreciate the replies. I forgot to mention I was also going to put my old zwave devices on the old hub that seem to cause some issues for me. I hear what you’re saying with the battery devices except when the batteries go I am having issues with it interrupting things. I also have the issue where sometimes the zwave takes a long time to turn everything off say in my downstairs. If I turn off 1 light, no problem - it works instantly. If I do all lights, it takes 20 seconds and not everything shuts off. I have roughly 35 devices in my 2500 sq ft home. Many of them (say 10) are older Leviton devices, 3 door sensors, and 1 siren (from my old Wink setup). The siren batteries are the ones that seem to mess things up for me when they go dead.
Personally, I didn't retire my C-4 when I got the C-7. I had observed that my C-4 would become slow and nearly unresponsive at times, and that some of my network-based integrations were taking up a lot of the hub's CPU. So now my C-7 handles the devices and the bulk of the automation, while the C-4 segregates all the network-only "devices" and the automations that primarily concern them.
I wrote Filtered Device Mirror to help further reduce the load on the C-7 from network devices on the C-4.
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Hey that looks interesting! Would also work with services using Maker API as well. Bookmarked - Thanks!
I used to use my C4s by location (one on second floor/one in basement) and had a C5 for testing. A C4 died on me but the C7's had just come out so shifted to a C7 for Z-Wave, repurposed the C5 for Zigbee and because I had a spare C5 on hand I used that one for my network/cloud stuff - mainly Lutron and Alexa. The old C4 I donated to a local arts center.
You could easily have ghosts on your C5 without knowing it which could be affecting your mesh. (You would need a stick paired as a secondary controller to see). I would say move all of your z-wave stuff to the C7, make sure there are no ghosts and see how your mesh plays out then before trying to segregate anything. Your older leviton stuff may be z-wave and not z-wave plus so you will need to install z-wave poller as well. I'd encourage you to change out to z-wave plus to boost your overall mesh speed.
Thanks for the advice. I’m certain the Leviton is not zwave plus. I’ll give it a shot and see what happens! Can I see the ghosting you’re referring to with the C-7?
I will check that out! Thanks!
Yes... Ghosts are caused my incomplete pairings. Any time you have a bad pairing (or it doesn't pair) STOP. Check your z-wave details page for a ghost (it will have nothing in the routing column) Remove that, factory reset the device and attempt pairing again. Non - plus devices may need to be paired close to the hub because they won't pair through repeaters
I have a Lutron and Hue hub. How would you recommend me putting those back on the C-5 after I transfer everything to C-7?
You could leave the lutron and hue integration there, but honestly they don't take up much resources.
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Agree with @rlithgow1 about just leaving them but if you wanted to put them back on the C5 it's just a matter of copying the config and then using Hub Mesh to share the devices as needed for rules etc. or did I miss something? 
Thanks, everyone, for the input! I’ll see how the transfer goes and go from there. I really appreciate your time and helpful responses!
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Just wanted to give @brad5 some credit here as he helped with with a similar issue in the following thread:
Help offloading Envisalink processing to another hub
“No problem! It was much easier than this will make it out to be, mostly because I'm more than a bit OCD.
I had hub mesh installed, configured, and tested on both hubs before I started. Hint: I got lazy and just enabled EVERY device for hub mesh. More than 500. Big mistake. I suggest you be more judicious than I and mesh only those devices you need. . . .”
@brad5 patiently outlined all the step-by-step instructions to a relative noob (me) on how to off-load some apps and devices to another hub and how to get two hubs meshed at the same time. For those of you not already familiar with this process, this may help.
