I have an old C5 model that I've been using for around 5 years. I had a failure while I was out of town and couldn't get it back up remotely. I decided to buy a C8-Pro. Since the C5 still works but I'm getting worried about it's stability, I was hoping to use the C8-Pro as the "main" hub and the C5 as the "secondary" hub.
However, it doesn't seem like that's how the Hub Mesh works. Since I obviously want my new beefy C8-Pro to do most of the heavy lifting, what are my options?
a. Restore all Apps/Devices from C5 to C8, and then factory reset C5 to add as the "secondary" hub to Hub Mesh?
b. Ditch the C5 altogether? I didn't have many issues with the network (sometimes zigbee devices would be act up, but that probably has more to do with how I have the devices arranged in the house)
I think what I want is a High Availability network/Load Balancing between the two hubs so each device will hit the closest hub and if one goes down, the other hub will continue to work properly. Is there anyway to do that?
If you are questioning the stability that red flag would have me thinking twice about using the unit in any "mission critical" mode. Even with just monitoring it could just stop working and your monitor would be gone. I know its a tough call of which point is the device destined for the dead technology museum but put some good thought into your decision.
That is correct Hub mesh is to allow you to split the load between the hubs. Zwave and zigbee can't be connect to multiple devices. In most cases people split types of connectivity between hubs like one hub running zigbee while another runs zwave. Another option is to split lan/cloud integrations off since they can be more heavy handed on the hub resources they run on.
If you want to be able to fail over quickly best option is the hub protect subscription. Then you could atlease restore all everything quickly. Then you need a second hub that atleast is similar to your main hub to restore to.
Do you mean you want to hot-swap between hubs, like plug in the C5 if the C8 fails? That isn't how it works, nor can it do that due to how Z-wave and Zigbee work.
Migrating hubs is the only option for something like this, you are pretty much cloning one hub (the C5) onto the new hub. You can't reverse clone a hub either, if that is what you want to do. The C8 cannot be cloned to any older series hub.
You may want to keep the C5 for problematic devices that can't or don't want to be paired with the C8, there are some Zigbee devices for example that don't play nice. You also may want to use the C5 for problematic or intensive integrations.
The C5 froze when I was out of town and needed to be hard rebooted. That was the entire reason to get the C8-Pro. Since I had the C5 for nearly 6 years, I thought it was time to get a new one. I have it controlling all HVAC so the AC was off for the entire weekend and I couldn't access it (we have pets). We ended up having our pet sitter just configure the AC for auto rather than using the sensors, probably good practice for vacation mode anyway.
I just read about the hub protect subscription that sounds handy! I'm going to subscribe to that. If only for this single migration, it'll be worth it.
From my experience this has generally been a result of something either not playing nice, or the hub has some non obvious corrupted data. It would be interesting to see if the hub had some unplanned reboots from loss of power while you were away.
I would start with doing a reboot with the advanced option to rebuild the DB on next reboot. This is basically a soft reset. There are so many strange things i have seen caused by corrupt data. Keep in mind the DB doesn't need to be corrupted for there to be bad data. I have gotten into the habit of performing the rebuild DB option even if things appear to be working if it hasn't been done for a long time.
That said if you got a C8 Pro to replace your C5 it is still a great upgrade to do for a lot of reasons. Prior to the C8 Pro the general SOC was the same from the C5-C8, but the C8 Pro got a much newer SOC allong with the extra RAM.
You dont need Hub Protect for the migration actually. Hubitat allows one backup free for migration. I would also point out that i dont think the C5 backup includes one of the Z radios. So keep that in mind as well.
I have been an HE customer since Feb 2018 and in the early days the C3/C4 hubs struggled with the large number of zwave (90) and zigbee (75) devices I had so I ran a multi hub setup. I split Zwave, Zigbee, LAN, and then had a 4th coordinator hub that ran all the apps. I kept this configuration when I upgraded the hubs to C7s. Once the C8P came out I combined the radios on to one hub and LAN and apps on another C8P so have 2 running today.
I bring this up because unless you have more than 75 zwave and 75 Zigbee devices there shouldn’t be an advantage to split them. I found managing multiple hubs a pain over time which is why I combined them in the C8P.
I think with the release of the C8Pro the benefit has dropped considerably. I wouldn't say there couldn't be situations were it could be helpful, but the extra Ram and SOC power of the C8Pro has got a long way in reducing the potential need for it. Especially between the Zigbee and Zwave radios.
I would think it is more likely someone would see benefits when looking at very chatty, and busy Local Lan integration stuff. The other possibility is if someone wrote allot of rules that are very system intensive. I have no doubt some users fall into that category just based on conversations. Even on the C8 Pro the Processor is still a Quad Core Arm processor which can be overwhelmed if you do the wrong things.
Answer really depends on your setup and if you are seeing any lag. I have 200 radio devices on my radio hub these days and those are meshed to my “coordinator” hub. On that hub I have around 380 total devices which include the 200 radio plus another 180 LAN and virtual devices plus 200 apps.
Things run great on it. I have many custom apps and use Rule Machine, no webcore.
Because of the additional CPU and memory the C8P supports a few integrations that don’t work on the C8/7.
I ended up getting everything working but it was kind of a drag and took a few tries. Posting in case this can help anyone out in the future.
First you MUST exclude all ZWave devices. I was hoping I wouldn't have to do that if I wasn't using the old C5. Then you have to re-add each device onto the new hub. For me that included taking the new hub around room to room to re-add devices that were hardwired (switches, thermostats).
Even though I did the cloud backup and chose to backup all Zigbee radios, I had to re-add every zigbee device too. I did not have to exclude them first, I simply had to re-add them through Zigbee pairing. Then I decided to rebuild the Zigbee network because I had to move some around to get the new hub to recognize them.
Then I went through and fixed all my broken apps. I'm sure most of the headache around migrating is due to ZWave devices needing to be excluded/re-added, which breaks any associated apps.
I have mine setup with Home Assistant too, so I had to ensure I exposed the "new" Zwave devices to the Maker API and then fix any broken entities there.
Overall, once I figured out the plan after some trial and error, it took about 3 hours.
I might end up using the old hub in a mesh with the Zigbee devices since my network isn't that strong (lots of sensors but only a few plugs for signal repeating), but we'll see how it goes.
With a migration that should not have been that way. It should have just worked, with the possible exception of having to maybe do a shutdown to power cycle the new hub. Even then, most times the migration just works without any messing around.
Something was not right in that process, but hopefully it is all working now.
I did the cloud migration but I very well could have done something wrong. I tried it a few times actually and then did a hard reset between each attempt.
The devices migrated over to the new hub but I couldn't interact with them, this was for both Zigbee and Zwave.
I was not able to re-add the Zwave devices so I had to go exclude them from the original hub first.
Same with the Zigbee devices, they were showing up on the new hub but I had to re-pair them. I tried a few times and then just gave up and re-added everything manually.
When this happened to me, a power cycle brought back the Z-wave, then another a few hours later brought back the ZigBee.
Then a few days later the ZigBee disappeared again and the only way to get them back was the procedure you performed, going around and re-joining each device.
You could have tried the "zwave tango" for your z-wave devices.
When you load the backup on to your new hub, all your devices and rules etc. will be there with the device ID. From your backup.
Pick a z-wave device and change it's device label from say, Bedroom Light to Bedroom Lightold.
Now do an exclude on your new hub for your bedroom light. The device will not be deleted as it is not known to the new hubs zwave radio. It should show as unknown device excluded.
Include your zwave device and call it bedroom light.
Change the network ID of your included device to that of the 'old' device ID.
Delete your old device.
I did this many, many moons ago when I went from a C5 to a C7.
It did work but it's best to do it one device at a time.
This may not work anymore but it certainly did. At least this way all your rules etc. will not need reconfiguring as they use the device ID's.
