Setting up a new hub with hub mesh

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1

My hubitat has been working great. So naturally I bought a second hubitat hub to be able to setup a hub mesh and hopefully improve some connectivity.

You know what they say. If it ain't broke, order more equipment and mess around with it until you really screw it up. :rofl: So, basically, I'm just looking for advice from someone who has done this before I really really screw this up, and bounce around some ideas before I start.

Here is my situation. Currently I have two buildings about 20 feet apart (house and garage). Existing hubitat hub is in the house, and the garage is linked to the house using 2 ring zwave repeaters. I have no zigbee at all. It has worked well, but I have noticed that sometime the garage can be a little slow in activating. Hence my desire to put in a second zwave hub in the garage to handle the half dozen z-wave devices out their locally and mesh back to the home hub. Make sense so far?

I have setup the two hubs, meshed them, but the garage hub is currently empty other than a couple of virtual test devices to make sure everything is working,

My thoughts so far is to keep the garage hubitat with minimal configuration (very few apps, etc), and just effectively use it as a zwave bridge back to the main home hub where all my rules and such currently exist. I may migrate some "garage only" rules over to the hub, but that will happen later. Thoughts? Does hub mesh add any significant delay?

One question did pop into my mind though. For devices that I have that are IP controlled (ie, sonos speaker, lifx bulb, etc), is it better that each hub talk directly to the device itself, or have access to the device shared through one hub which is the master for that device?

2

I think your approach makes sense. I have not noticed any appreciable delay with hub mesh, and it is a lot easier if all your automation are in one place. But as you point out if there's a garage-only rule that benefits from being closer to the edge, so to speak, yeah that should work as well.

On your last question, I'm guessing having your IP-controlled devices "home" to a particular hub rather than trying to access them directly from both hubs is going to be much easier to deal with long term. And some integrations may support only that method- I know I have at least one where the IP-based device uses essentially a locked-up connection and nothing else can grab it.

3

Brad.

the biggest pain in all this is going to be the actual migration of the devices. This is what I am thinking.

  • create virtual devices for all the devices in the garage that exist on the home hub now.
  • modify all the rules that point to the real devices to point to the temporary virtual devices,
  • zwave wave exclude and then re-include all the garage devices. (with zstick ghost killer on standby)
  • modify rules to point back to real devices
  • delete temporary devices.

make sense?

Rich

4

Yes it does. That way none of your rules get broken etc. If you want to take a shortcut you can clone the rule and let HE help you with the device replacements in the rule.

5

good point.. I can definately use that on the rule machine ones, but for the other apps your kinda stuck.

6

I know this is an old thread but I was thinking of moving my C7 to the garage to do exactly what you are explaining. I've got both the C8 and C7 working now, mesh set up. What I don't see is anything in zigbee on the C7 (secondary hub). Am I doing something wrong here?

7

Good plan.