My 10 year old vera3 just died and looking get a hubitat c8 pro. I use USA zwave relays but with USA frequency.
Is there an easy way to migrant from vera to Hubitat?
Can the hubitat be nice with battery back to to the zwave relay to add it to the network like zera 3 could?
Thanks
You'll be very pleased with Hubitat. Not just because the hardware is so much more modern than Vera, but the community and staff are infinitely more vibrant and helpful. If you encounter any obstacles during the changeover, you won't be alone. There are a ton of Vera veterans here!
Some questions to ask yourself, before I answer yours:
- Were you a PLEG user? If so, you'll love Rule Machine.
- Were you a Reactor user? Ditto. In fact, Reactor works with Hubitat, so you might even be able to bridge some of your automations over to the C-8 Pro before you get all your devices paired. Only you'll have to adjust your thinking on what constitutes a "Trigger" vs "Action".
- Were you using Alexa Speaks? Check out its fancy cousin Echo Speaks once you get aboard Hubitat. Setup is cringe, but the payoff is handsome.
- Did you know you can unpair ZW devices with any ZW hub? You can go ahead and retire the Vera; it won't be needed for the transition.
You asked whether it's possible to carry the Elevation hub around connected to a USB battery (as opposed to an extension cord, lol), for pairing devices requiring close proximity, like some Locks and S2-enabled things. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised at the radio range on the C-8 Pro! Honestly, unless you have a HUGE floorplan, there's a chance you won't even need repeaters (or as many of them).
Come back to the Forum, and post under the appropriate category, if you wind up having any questions or concerns. I'm confident that your Hubitat experience will make you wonder why you waited. Suddenly, things like managing Modes and installing built-in & community apps will seem like child's play.
My first recommendation would be to install Hubitat Package Manager (HPM), not solely as a good exercise in porting code over to your new hub, but also as the magic gateway to other important add-ons you'll want.
Thanks for the reply. Yes have large property with zwave relays used externally for garden lights etc which have the relay outdoors. I'm assuming I have to either remove the relay from the external fitting and bring close to the hubitat to pair like the Vera?
Surely the range on the hubitat doesn't allow me to keep the hubitat inside the house near my comms rack and pair relays which are located 50mtrs away in external housings?
I have Yale door locks zwave and use enerwave zwave relays for all other lighting.
Assuming the hubitat needs to be within a few meters of the enerwave relays to pair?
All I can say is the the antenna range of the C-8 Pro is legendary. You might search the forum for instances where users could remove extra repeaters formerly needed in two-story homes!
But like I said in my first reply, I was able to take my Hubitat hub around the house with me using a plug-in USB battery. So in a pinch you could too.
Welcome. I left Vera/Ezlo 2 years ago frustrated with the EOL of Vera and the immaturity of Ezlo.
I haven't been disappointed. There is a bit of a learning curve to Hubitat but its not huge and once you get comfortable it is much more powerful. I wrote about this some time back....
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same here- i had a vera for several years. always had issues, crashes, devices disappearing off the network and then one day it died. Much research led be to hubitat and all i can say is that the difference is night and day.
Managed to keep most of my vera z-wave devices and move them over to hubitat.
Only negative was that i had to reprogram the whole system from scratch (no simple migration) which, to be fair, is a great way to learn the ecosystem. its so much more intuitive and easy to use and configure. i recall many a headache trying to write scripts in LUA for vera which was prone to errors.
Get the occasional little blip with hubitat but the community is quick to help.
You wont be disappointed
IIRC, the library of LUA code in the wild was miniscule compared with the dozens/hundreds of Groovy-based apps and drivers the Hubitat system enjoys. What's more, we live in a time when, if you REALLY have to create something from scratch to suit specific needs, it's possible to enlist the help of AI for that.
Thnaks for the reply. I do have a vera Plus as backup but still looking to move to Hubitat or Home Assistance with a mini PC. My issues is i started my Zwave network 9 years ago and then there wasn't any AUS frequency Zwave stuff ( im in australia) so i got USA frequency. Now more Zigbee and AUS frequency zwave is coming out here and needed something that could possibly do both frequencies, AUS and USA. I know the Hubitat cant have extra USB Zwave dongles, but a Mini PC running Home Assistance can, so i may swing the HA way ( Unless i try and find a Hubitata 5 which can have external Zwave dongles)
The US and Oz ZWave devices could be run across two different Hubitat devices (one configured for the US freq and the other for the Oz stuff).
You’d then use Hubitat’s built-in Hub Mesh to expose the devices from one Hubitat to the other.
This works well, and isn’t limited to just ZWave devices. Hub Mesh works across your LAN, so it can be used to spread stuff fairly widely across larger properties (‘sheds, outhouses and such 
)
Problem being I would then have to buy 2 $300 hubitat hubs where as with home assistant, zwave and ZigBee dongles are around $70 and I can run home assistant from one of the many laptops I have laying around.
Not sure if HA is good as I want something easy to set up, and able to just let it run with a nice dashboard like Vera had.
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Home Assistant is the great smart home translator. They talk to pretty much anything, but automation on there is not as easy as with Hubitat in my opinion. There's a fantastic community integration here that brings devices from Home Assistant into Hubitat. There's also an integration that goes the opposite direction if you ever needed that for any reason.
What you could do is setup HA just for one of the two Z-Wave frequencies (logically the one with fewer devices), and then use the integration to bring those devices into Hubitat to automate.
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To add to what @SmartHomePrimer wrote, it isn’t that easy to add a second ZWaveJS add on to HA.
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