After 14 years using Indigo on a Mac I swapped across to a pair of c-7’s in November last year.
Completely rebuilt my zwave network splitting up and down stairs between the hubs with a mesh between. Don’t think I needed two hubs but you know how it is with new tech.
Had a few issues with ghost devices and bit of a learning curve.
Then they brought out the c-8 and like any good red blooded tech freak (can I say that with all the current political correctness) I brought another 2….. Dis I need them? Of course I did.
So the question is…. With the following rough list of what I have, what would be a good set up using the 3 or 4 hubs and associated devices. I’ll be going back to green field and stripping out all the kit to start again
Your ideas and imagination would be most appreciated.
2 x c-8 hubs
2 x c-7 hubs
Zwave mix of devices approximately 40 majority powered.
Zigbee mix of devices but less diverse functions 35
Ring doorbell
Ring alarm
Nest smoke/co2 detectors 6
Honeywell evo home heating controller with 10 valves
House is 3 floors with some devices at the bottom of the garden in the a shed. No real issues with distance. Small English town not a 2,000 acre Texas Ranch. 
Sorry for the rambling on but spent many years on Indigo cocking it up and then working it out till it was working nicely but it would be good to cut the trial and error out on Hubitat and use the collective hive mind to get a good base design to build on. e.g. split zwave and Zigbee onto separate hubs and mesh back to a c-7 to run all the automation with the c-8s just doing the comms. ???
Your thoughts and ideas would be greatly received.
I too have 4 hubs, a pair of C-7 and a pair of C-8. One of my C-7 is used for Internet facing and LAN devices. (Alexa, weather, Homebridge, etc.) The other three hubs are for Z-Devices. All of them have ZWave devices but only one of the three has Zigbee devices.
C-8 <- 24 ZWave / 0 Zigbee
C-8 <- 26 ZWave / 23 Zigbee
C-7 <- 32 Zwave / 0 Zigbee
Ignoring Zigbee for the moment, the ZWave hubs are all dedicated to a physical area.. Upstairs, Downstairs and "Front".
The front third of my home, upstairs and down, has a lot of devices clustered rather close to each other. Initially I bought that C-7 intending to migrate Downstairs hub a year ago. I gave it the Antenna mod and it worked really well. I added devices from the hub outward, powered first and suddenly I found that there was a big distance between the initial set of migrated devices and what could have been the 2nd set. There are about 8 devices that were Upstairs (but at the front third) and the new split was born called Front. 
There's no Zigbee in that area so a dedicated ZWave hub worked out extremely well.
I have no objection to Zigbee but it's another mesh to maintain and I initially was going to ignore Zigbee. However, two things pushed me to use Zigbee a little bit.. 1) Motion sensors are faster, and 2 Fan Controllers. I waited years for a ZWave ceiling fan controller and finally gave up and bought 4 of the Hampton Bay Fan Controllers (HBFC) which are the most annoying Zigbee devices I've encountered. Every HBFC seems to require a repeater in the same room. That meant for my 4 HBFC I needed to add 8 devices to a Zigbee hub. Throw in 3-4 Zigbee motion sensors for the few spaces that needed the extra third of a second response and suddenly I had a dozen Zigbee. At 2.4gh, the RF doesn't pass walls as easily as 900mhz ZWave and I started with some plug-in repeaters. Soon, I'd find them on the floor or in a drawer because the rest of my family thought they were not in use and wanted to use the wall outlet. I then went through and bought a few Zigbee in-wall switches and dimmers and swapped out perfectly working ZWave device just to "hide" the Zigbee repeaters.
So that's my home today... a single Zigbee mesh on a single C-8 that grew to include Fobs for presence but is there mostly for the HBFCs and responsive Motion Sensors. Plus 3 independent ZWave meshes for the majority of functionality. I continue to use HubConnect when most would use HubMesh because HubConnect isn't broken and I still like it.
Your device mix is very different from mine, and because you now have 4 hubs, you really can't go wrong with having one hub manage a smaller set of devices. There's obvious advantages of outages that affect a smaller area... I've never had a hub failure, but I upgrade them often and of course the reboot time is an outage. I upgraded my Zigbee C-8 to 2.3.5.118 yesterday and then all the rest this morning. I can time those upgrades to occur in the different parts of the house when no one is there.. thus hiding the reboot from my family. With a single hub, I'd hear about it.
My setup for hime automation is:
- Hardware
- 1 Hubitat C-8 hub (for all ZWave {96 devices} and zigbee (10 devices})
- 1 LoraWan Hub (for all LoraWan devices.)
- 1 small pc like device to run docker
- Software
- 1 Node-RED Container
- 1 Home Assistant Container
- 1 MQTT Container
Voila
I have no need or desire for any more hubs than that. Less is more when it comes to administration and maintenance.
EDIT: To be clear, I'm not trying to judge. There are LOTS of reasons it may make sense to use more hubs/hardware. I prefer the minimum it takes to do the job, but sometimes that is more than one for a lot of reasons (physical locations/extra buildings, interference, personal preference, etc).
Many thanks good sir. Given me lots to think about and love the diagram. Reason for starting to use Zigbee is that Zwave is about 4 times the price in the UK and very limited retailers.
Again thanks for taking the time to share.
Many thanks. Less hardware, more software?
Yeah, that's a fair characterization.
I already use docker for a number of other things, so for me that was a "sunk cost" in terms of setup/maintenance.
Like @JasonJoel I have "other hubs" running as software too. I have a Mac Mini that is my Media Server but has a ton of cycles available. So I run Node-Red, HubConnect Proxy and Homebridge as NodeJS modules. (Most would use Docker but I let them run natively.) In my Total Home Automation System, I include those as hubs, because they are individually rebootable modules too.
There is no one-right-answer, so you're doing the best thing.. ask for ideas, ask for concerns.
Cracking chaps thanks for taking the time to discuss.
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