I'm hoping for some advice on setup of a second hub. I've been on HE for about a month and was having dropout issues on numerous Iris V1 motion sensors. Since then I've purchased 10 Iris V1 Zigbee outlets and placed them around the house, but am still getting the dropouts. My house is a 2 story home with tons of interference from WIFI mesh, appliances, and a cell booster, not to mention it's a bigger house.
A quick snapshot of my devices are 60+ Sylvania Osram bulbs, 20+ Sengled bulbs, 10 Phiilips Hue bulbs, 15 Iris V1 motion sensors, and a few Samsung contact and motion sensors. Also have 2 Zwave locks, 7 Sonos speakers, and 10 Iris V1 outlets. Other than the locks everything else is Zigbee.
With the weekly loss of the Iris motion sensors, would it be better to install the 2nd hub as a master / slave setup or use the 2nd hub independently from the main hub for all the upstairs devices?
My wife is losing patience with my new hobby of resyncing devices back to the hub to get our automation running. I'm looking for a reliable solution.
I would recommend putting bulbs that work as repeaters (your Osram bulbs and Hue bulbs) on a separate Hubitat. While these bulbs work adequately as repeaters for other bulbs, they do not work well as repeaters for other zigbee devices.
You can share devices between your two Hubitats using HubConnect.
Edit: Also - get some z-wave repeaters for your locks.
Strictly bulbs. Except the Sengleds (which don't repeat - thankfully).
Not that I know of. That's only the V2 outlets. Also, if you have the V2 outlets, the zigbee and z-wave pairings to hubitat have to be done separately.
I'm just going to interject here and tell you to be careful of the iris plugs on the zwave side. The firmware does matter. I had troubles with my mesh and support recommended removing them from z-wave. If they're older firmware, they'll beat up your Z-Wave. Also, I have all of my osrams and crees on a separate hub with no repeaters and they do fine. If you get failures, then add a zigbee plug or two. Those bulbs are nice, but they're very problematic. You can keep the sengled on your regular hub. They don't repeat.
[EDIT]
What was recommended to me for locks is an aeotec z-wave repeater. I have one on the way this week, so I'll check in and let you know.
Are you certain all your iris devices are V1? As @aaiyar said, only the V2 iris zigbee plugs also contain a z-wave repeater. That would be model # 3210-L (and it’s slightly updated cousin 3210-L2). V1/V2/V3 were never official designations by iris, AFAIK, so without referencing a specific model # it’s hard to know whether we’re all talking about the same device.
It may sound like splitting hairs, but the first generation of iris devices (aka V1) use a non-standard zigbee profile. So they will only repeat for other V1 iris devices. The V2 outlets will only repeat for zigbee devices that use the ZHA 1.2 profile (which Iris V1 devices do not use). And the z-wave repeater in them will only repeat for other z-wave devices.
If this is true it explains why after adding 10 plugs my Zigbee mesh still was crap. Someone mentioned in a post that the Iris V1 outlets are good Zigbee repeaters, but they didn't mention it only works for V1 products.
That's a bummer. My suggestion is to avoid Iris gen 1 devices at all costs. IMHO the only reason to use them at this point is if you were an iris subscriber and were already heavily invested in that generation of devices.
Hubitat added support for the gen 1 Iris devices primarily to entice Iris refugees to come over to Hubitat when Lowes shut down Iris. But they are otherwise truly dead-end devices.
The 2nd and 3rd generation of Iris devices that use the standard zigbee HA 1.2 profile, on the other hand, are great and work with many different hubs that support zigbee.
It's definitely not straightforward. FWIW (possibly not so much at this point if you're already out >100 bucks), here's an old post from the SmartThings forum by @srwhite that lists in detail all the 2nd iris devices that support the standard zigbee profile. The 3rd gen devices aren't included in this list.
Maybe. But it is far more likely that the 60 Osram/Sylvania/LEDvance bulbs were messing your zigbee network up. Bulbs that repeat are a zigbee mesh's worst enemy. And the magnitude of their effect increases exponentially with the number of bulbs you have. 60 is a huge number.
That's another good point. @twhite983 it's likely that your zigbee mesh is really in poor shape, between all the subpar repeaters (bulbs) and non-standard zigbee devices (iris gen 1).
And to make things even worse, IIRC these devices don't use standard zigbee or z-wave either. They had to use some kind of proprietary protocol to get ADT to agree to release the co-branded line of keypad/hub and sensors with SmartThings (supposedly more reliable wireless communications than standard zigbee/z-wave?).
Tough and expensive lesson that I'm learning twice now. At least Ebay got me half my money back.
I think I'll stick to mainstream motion sensors like Samsung.
I actually was happy with all the ADT sensors. They were super fast, almost instantaneous and quick resets too. The hub was garbage as it kept crashing or going offline. If the hub was half decent I would still be using it.
there are several generations of SmartThings motion sensors as well. I picked up one of the newest gen devices last year and I've been pretty happy with it. It responds quickly and the mount uses a magnetic ball and socket joint that makes it easy to aim the sensor in pretty much any direction. I think I probably got it on sale for Black Friday or something, but it looks like it's currently $25. Not a terrible price.
at this point, rather than look at it as a lost investment,
can we look at it as its own mesh or network?
if the devices that work with HE, but do not work with all devices that work with HE, where to be isolated to only mesh with themselves, as in (% of sales is accepted as a discount on the next hub purchase ;} ) another hub with just these devices.
Got 2? what is another one, cheaper than the learning experiance associated with the above $110.
Just another thought from an addled mind.
