Someday I'll make things better. Today I have three hubs with two Zigbee meshes and two Z-wave meshes. Rules and random non-mesh devices are spread across two of the hubs. How did this happen?
Years ago I was on Wink and an internet outage left me without security lighting when I was out of town. I found Hubitat and bought a C-4 hub and was loving the local integration and better automation. My security lights weren't just motion controlled they also change colors based on the holidays. I hobbled together a Groovy app and it was working great.
The only issue is that I had lights that sometimes fell off the mesh and needed to be re-paired. It happened every few months - often enough that it was a problem. All my lights at the time were Sylvania Zigbee bulbs. I learned how bad Zigbee bulbs are as repeaters so I moved my lights to a dedicated C-5 hub and life was good.
Then the Z-wave radio on the C-4 died so I picked up a C-7 and migrated all the Z-wave and non-bulb Zigbee devices to it. The C-4 is still kicking with some oddball devices like my Onkyo receiver. I never got around to finishing the migration since things were working.
On top of all this my apps page looks like this:
What a mess of unused and test rules. The motion rules have been replaced with custom programming that I'm really happy with. Some of the tests were working on reducing false positives on the exterior sensors. Always trying new things, never cleaning up the old (mostly). Somehow everything works.
Anyway there is no real point to this story. Just pondering how I got here. It has to be one of the most OCD unfriendly integrations around. I was looking at the Zigbee graphs today and wondering what to do about some unknown devices.
The new graphs are pretty neat. One of the meshes is interesting. I like the symmetry in it.
The ultimate goal is to start from scratch and rebuild everything. I want to start with a C-8 and rebuild the main Zigbee and Z-wave meshes. Then the C-7 will be factory reset and become the new home of the Zigbee bulb mesh. The new maps will help make sure there are enough repeaters in that mesh. A second C-7 I already have will handle the one-off devices like the Onkyo and integrations that might be on the heavy side (Homekit, Alexa, etc.). The custom lighting app will likely live on the C-8 where all the motion sensors are. The C-5 will go to a friend that is interested in dabbling in some automation.
Someday it might be a system to show off. It just needs to bubble up to the top of the projects list. 
Does anybody else have their own flavor of nightmare configuration?
. I can't claim any regular practices I have adopted in this space, but I do, where I can, try to keep things contained, away from my "production" hubs that run the rest of the house. I think one of the main things I fall down on as well is cleaning up old test devices, apps and other stuff, needing to occasionally do a clean out.
