Per subject, second Hubitat hub has arrived! I didn't really need one for coverage, I have good connectivity throughout the house, but thought it would be good to have a second hub at the slightly farther end of the house (hub is a little off-center biased towards family room. The other end of the house will get a little larger/farther away after an upcoming remodel, so it seemed like a good idea to extend my coverage options a bit.
I'm assuming that I'll use the new hub mesh feature to tie the two hubs together and share devices. Is that a good idea/assumption, compared to Hub Connect?
I am curious about approaches to dealing w/devices...deciding which ones I should move from the current hub to the new one, don't want to mess up the existing mesh.
Also curious about other cautions and issues I should be aware of when running two hubs at the same time.
So for my C-4 hubs I split them in the same way you are thinking about doing - by location. I tried to keep the rules local to each hub and only had a few crossovers (illuminance, mode and a few other things). Originally I used HubConnect but switched to Node-RED which allows me to centralize things. Hub Mesh looks cool too.
For the C-7 - I'm kinda going the opposite way. Am consolidating my Z-Wave devices on to one hub. The Zigbee devices are still living on my C-4s but everything is now in a central closet on our first floor. Am thinking about first combining one C-4 device into the other and then maybe switch to a C-5 I have laying around not sure.
Either way splitting up a hub either by location or type helps reduce overhead and may increase speed/response times - anecdotally of course!
edit: I really liked having 2 hubs by location and may do so again in the future.
Thanks for the real-world examples. I did notice that @csteele had said below, sounds similar to what you mention.
Personally I like automations running on the same device as the switch/outlet/bulb. The Z-radios are the bottleneck, and therefore short queues will allow the devices to work at max speed.. which isn't very high, compared to say.. WiFi.
That does seem to make intuitive sense that having devices/automations together would be best.
I initially ran 1 hub on zigbee and 1 on Zwave for about a year but never saw any benefit.
I have since expanded to 4 hubs one per floor and one dedicated to cloud devices and dashboard.
I have found this to be much more beneficial. If one hub fails I only lose one area and only have to rebuild a much smaller network and rules.
Also much easier for trouble shooting.
I agree with you!! Hubs by location (for me) like you are describing were great. There were no worries about weak meshes. Very reliable and easy to troubleshoot and maintain.
I'm basically doing it (by device type) now because I'm far too lazy to move all the zigbee stuff over - some are wired in relays in light fixtures and are a pain to get to.. plus with all the fun Z-wave stuff going on with the C-7 I'm wondering if it's also messing with the Zigbee stuff as well - not in the radio interference sense but in the backend processing.
I'm new to Hubitat but not new to either Z-wave or home automation. We have three buildings spread across our property inside a diameter of perhaps 150 yards. I find that one hub per building is working perfectly. The z-wave network is rock solid this way (I do use two dedicated repeaters in each of two buildings) and automations are essentially instant because there's less for each hub to manage. I have not connected these together via Hub mesh or anything else and don't yet see a reason to do so, although that may change. Anyway, my two cents: Separating hubs based on location works great as a strategy.
FWIW, I operate 3 hubs, and until today I operated all my Zigbee and Zwave stuff on my C4, and run all my Rules/integrations on a C5. I had put a C7 in, and updated it's firmware, but hadn't done anything else with it, as I intended to transition the radio devices from the C4 to C7.
However, over the past few months, I've realized that my Zwave network isn't all that it should be, and I've have some issues with home/appliance/ducting layout resulting in "blind spots" in the signal environment that made me think 2 Radio hubs, one in the basement, and one on the 2nd floor might solve some of these issues.
So my new plan is to add a second C7 hub to the network, and transition the devices off the C4 to the two C7s depending on location, leaving the automations (for now) on the C5.
To answer your Hub Mesh question, to put it bluntly, it's fantastic. I used hubconnect, and that's a quite excellent package, but for devices connected direct to a hubitat hub, Hub Mesh is amazing.
It presents itself much more cleanly than hubconnect, mostly because there are fewer userland abstractions that have to be dealt with. Share device on one hub, and import it on the other, and done. As far as RM etc are concered, the device is local, and all it's underlying command classes, etc appear to be exposed. This means that you don't have to customize a driver for unusual devices that hubconnect hasn't seen. If Hubitat has a driver for it, then it appears as that device on the remote hub.
I have several runs of Cat6 between two of our buildings, but a third building where I have a hub is a very tiny office built on a utility trailer (think tiny home) that has an RV-style power hookup running down through the woods to supply it with AC. I put my first HE hub there to control the heating in that "building" as an experiment, when I was thinking about moving to Hubitat from the ISY (another home automation device). Because I had only so-so wifi in that tiny office anyway, and needed ehternet for the HE hub, I bought a powerline ethernet extender and hooked one end to the main router in one of the real" buildings while I plugged the other end into the AC inside the tiny office, using a cheap, unmanaged switch (really just an ethernet hub) so that I could plug in both the He and a computer. Somewhat to my surprise, it works like a charm!
I was always skeptical of the idea of use the powerline (your AC wiring) instead of a dedicated cat5/cat6 run, but now I think they're a great idea. Just something to consider if running dedicated cat5/cat6 would be a pain.
