Should I upgrade from HE C5 to C8?

So I have a Hubitat C5 that I've owned for a few years. I also have a HOOBS hub. I'm trying to understand what I would gain/realize by upgrading to the C8.

I'll just be "that guy" and say.... If everything is working fine, and there isn't something you need to do that you can't already, then leave it alone.

That said - the main C8 changes/benefits = zwave 800, zigbee 3.0, external antennas (better signal), Matter support (at some point)

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Thank you!!

@larrybradshaw

FWIW, I anticipate Matter will likely extend to earlier Hubitat Elevation models as well. Although obviously, they will have to make use of a thread border router on the same network.

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I'm in this boat. I'm still using my C5 despite having a C7 and a C8 in boxes just waiting for me.
Really debating what I should do.

Where I'm leaning is;

  1. Leave my C5 alone as it's chugging along great
  2. Turn on Hub Mesh
  3. Boot up my C8 and start using it for new devices and new apps
  4. Keep my C7 around as the fail-over if one dies

Am I digging a grave if I do that?

I would do exactly that, except I would just sell the C7. It really serves no purpose at this point. But that's me.

Just note that if you add any Z devices to the C8 you will never be able to migrate your C5 devices to it without wiping the C8 paired out, as migrating would wipe out the existing stuff already paired to the C8... So you would either have to re-pair anything paired to the C8 or re-pair everything paired to the C5.

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Personally, I moved to the C8 for backup and radio restore. The threshold is personal but at some point the time and aggravation of restoring a growing assortment of devices to a new hub when yours eventually dies from any cause -electrical surge, age, malign grandkid, WAF failure- is more costly than a C8. The comfort of being able to easily resume with a new C8 replacement hub and Hub Protect is more than worth it to me.

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Keep in mind that you will be starting a new mesh in that case. Adding a device here and there might prove more difficult depending on your environment. It won’t be able to take advantage of the repeaters on the existing hub.

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What I did: Migrated everything, then moved cloud and other memory intensive apps to the old hub. This gives a lot more memory headroom and the ability to easily recover from a hub failure with hub protect on the C-8. The other hub only needs a local backup to recover since the radios are off.

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I did too and was super excited about it. BUT if I could go back in time, I wouldn't. My zigbee mesh was ROCK solid on my old C5 and is anything but lackluster on the C8. So while I gained the backup/restore I lost stability. If I could go back I would have left that C5 running and just added the C8 for the newer technology and cloud integrations. So I think the OP has a good plan.

I’m not doubting you, but that’s not been my experience. My mesh was pretty solid on my C-5, but I had to keep my Hue dimmers and motion sensors on my Hue bridges because they would lose connection to HE. One of my outdoor sensors would still occasionally go unresponsive on the Hue bridge due to the distance. After migrating to the C-8, I moved them all back to HE and they have stayed connected since March. I have 103 Zigbee devices on my C-8 and I never had this level of reliability prior to this.

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If only things were consistent between all of us there would be a lot less threads on here...lol. Glad yours worked out that way for you.

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I know. I’m sure that most of it boils down to the devices being used, and how noisy the rf environment is. I wonder if the C-8 is more susceptible to rf interference. That might explain why some people have to put their C-8 in a different location than the hub it replaced to get a reliable connection. I think there are probably a lot of people shoving these into network closets with their router.

Was some of the early issues not caused by the default power setting being a little higher than it was on the C-7? Some have had good results knocking it down a little... I think.... Says the guy with limited knowledge in the area (me) :slightly_smiling_face:

I know my system seemed to get a lot better (Hue motion sensors, specifically) when the platform update came out (early summer) that adjusted the power (down) to 8. I think mine had been at 16 when I first moved to the C-8. I don't know if that was the fix or a pleasant coincidence.

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I had mine set to 20 until recently. I now have it set to 12, mostly just because I felt like tinkering with it. I first dropped it to 16. The next morning I noticed that the lqi on most of my routers had bumped up slightly. Then I figured I would try 12. The next morning the lqi of many routers had gone up significantly, and none had dropped significantly. That is where I decided to stop. I did have to let it settle overnight both times, because it didn't immediately look like a good idea on the route table. Things appear more meshy now on the zigbee graph, so it's probably a good thing.

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I've not had a single radio issue after the first early teething issues with the C8. I participated in the last few months of incremental beta updates and there were occasional glitches but I came to appreciate the continuing effort and commitment of the Hubitat staff to provide a great product. It quickly becomes obvious that getting it right is a continuous process. As for the zigbee radio, you might benefit from reducing the power -counterintuitive. I settled on 8 and it has been completely reliable.

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I've been down that road...I'm actually at 4 with my power as suggested by HE staff. Do not get me wrong...I love my HE hubs. Wouldn't switch away for anything else at this point. Just wished I would have left good enough alone with what was working great. 100% my fault.

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So many choices.... :sweat_smile:

My current plan is to keep my C5 running smoothly, new devices and apps on the C8, and if my C5 ever dies I'll either need to;

  1. Move my C8 apps to my backup C7
  2. Restore my devices/apps to the C8.

Not sure that would be possible (C8->C7 for apps only)

Long term I'd like to get to one hub for the devices and another for my apps/rules/etc.

If I were to start over from scratch I'd have my devices on my C-8 and pull out the C7 I never have used to handle the apps.

Very possible. You can restore all of your apps from a downloaded backup, just not z-radios. As long as you have hubprotect on your C-5 (or create a migration backup prior to the C-5's demise), you can then restore all of your devices to your C-8.