What's the best way to setup 2 C7 Hubs

If the house isn't a sprawling ranch, I would put all the zwave on one network for the strongest mesh. You could make the other hub zigbee if you want, but I have all my physical devices on one hub and all my cloud or lan devices on another. With hub mesh, you have a lot of options. Honestly, I would use just one hub if I were you. My second hub is a c-4, and I was just figuring out how to keep it. Plus I have it Doing my writes to influxdb, so no one can complain my C7 physical hub is doing something that it shouldn't.
Edit: I have about 200 physical devices with mix of zigbee and z wave on it. I have a third hub in a she shed across my yard and only did that because of the distance.

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Did you have something specific in mind when you bought two hubs?

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Thanks this is helpful!

Bought one and was given one as a gift. Figured I could use both to make a solid network. Currently I have some devices (mainly zwave locks) that take a while to fire when logic is triggered and thought maybe moving the logic to one hub would make that better.

Youll eventually find a use. I would just start with one hub and get it all setup. And then take the second one and tinker around with it (after you have linked all the devices through hub mesh). Then you can add some custom apps that call LAN endpoints like raspberry Pi's or dockers to graph your data. I have Schlage Z wave (non plus) locks and on the C7, they are very solid, much more than the c-5 or c-4. You want all the repeating devices on there.

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I was thinking of buying another hub just to extend the network without so many repeaters. Maybe have a second hub for the garage and man cave.. but wasn't sure about the UX can I control it from the one UI? Or is it essentially like having two separate hubs and home?? I don't want to be going back to main menu to connect to sendary hub to control another set of devices. How does it work woth two hubs on one network with one as a secondary hub?

With Hub Mesh setup and sharing devices between hubs, it should be like they exist on the one hub, so from an admin perspective you should be able to control them from the one hub. The same should be true for Dashboards, you can create dashboards on one hub that can include devices from both hubs. While I personally do this myself, I can't talk to the performance benefits, as I have never looked into this or discussed it myself.

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Thanks mate. My issue is my hub is at the front of my home in a sever room and I literally have devices 40 meters and inbetween l this is a number of brick walls, Lots of glass, a kitchen and my second story is colour bond facade.. all the stuff wifi signals love..

I haven't moved in yet but in the process of getting all setup.. all my devices are zwave plus. Should I be looking at getting another hub? I've already got a few extenders purchased. My devices are mainly Aeotec nano switches, fibaro smart plants, door sensors and tri sensors.. all in all about 50 devices..

I can't claim any personal experience with Z-Wave, only that more HE is never a bad thing.... :slight_smile: Like many around here, including those who haven't yet responded, I would say that a second hub is always useful..

To be fair I only got to the point of having a "development" hub in the last month or two. My second hub was a lighting hub, allowing me to move my Zigbee Hue lights off my Hue bridge and take advantage of my Samsung contact sensors and other HE specific devices and modes. Enough about my setup...

Having a second HE hub in a more appropriate location that is then connected via ethernet can only be a good thing... Extenders certainly help, but I expect there comes a point where physical limitations come into play and having a co-located hub is of benefit.... others can probably comment on this better than me...

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As long as you have an ethernet run to the back of the house (or a MoCA adapter or powerline) you could use 2 hubs by location.. This setup should work well.. would also provide extended coverage to your backyard if needed.

I've used multiple in hubs in both configurations - by location and by device type. Both work equally well for different reasons / use-cases. One of the nice things about doing it by location is if one hub has issues the other should keep on running provided you've kept your rules (mostly) local to each hub.

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That's the operational path I've taken...but I keep getting tempted to cross pollinate the awareness of the hubs to each other with the likes of Hub Mesh ...at the risk of dependencies.

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I guess for these kinds of systems ultimately distributed seems like the most resilient. I use Node-RED which is a centralized system - if that goes down everything does. I could always spin up a failover server though and the rules themselves are specific to each hub so one going offline won't affect the other's operation except for those sequences that require multiple hubs.

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HomeAutomationAsASystem

My system is "By Area" -- I have a Hub for most of the Downstairs devices. I have a hub for most of the Upstairs devices. I have another for "Front". I found I had a lot of devices, both Up and Downstairs, packed into the front third of the house. The devices were originally on the other two hubs, but I moved them to this third hub.

I set myself a 65 device/hub soft limit. Many people have 100+ devices, some 200+ on a single hub and thus I'm not suggesting ANY kind of device limit for other than arbitrary reasons. There's a list of pluses for multiple hubs and I want most of them :slight_smile: Redundancy, resilience, isolation, and so on. When 1 hub goes down for an upgrade, etc, only that portion of the house looses automation. IF I wish to do that 'middle of the day' I can usually upgrade all 4 with no one even knowing by trying to upgrade the hub for the area the family is not in at that moment.

All of the above has led me to use Node-Red much, much more than I originally imagined. The benefit is that I originally only ever used RuleMachine. I never tried Motion Lighting, etc. and the rest of the RM family of engines. Now I have a more generous distribution of right-tool-for-the-job. :slight_smile:

My advice is more hubs are better. :smiley:

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I’m About ready to add 2 more hubs to my setup. 1 ZWave, one zigbee, and one for everything else. Unfortunately the only way I see to make this move is to remove the pairing for all my devices off my primary hub and repair them to the new hubs. @csteele im curious to know why you are using hub connect still instead of hub mesh? Do you find it more of a benefit over hub mesh? I used to run hub connect when I had smart things still running but removed it once I turned that down.

In your diagram, do you run the Lutron integration on each hub and do you list every device on each hub as well? Just trying to understand your diagram more thoroughly. Thanks!

I'm more familiar with HubConnect and 98% because it ain't broken. I've recently built Bundles and ProBundles for HubConnect so I'm not fully done with it, is the remaining 2%.

As to Lutron... I only have Pico's. I am sure in some box somewhere, I have a Caséta dimmer. It would be a one off and I removed it 3 years ago. Yes, every hub has the Integration installed and every Pico is available to every Hub. It's just a matter of picking them in the Integration. The original hub has every Pico defined/selected in the Integration because once upon a time it was the only hub. That didn't last long :slight_smile: and as I added more hubs, I only added the Picos for that Hub's Area. I can have a single Pico launch actions on multiple hubs. The button presses are seen on each hub that has that Pico selected. I always thought that would be fun, but so far, haven't found an actual need.

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Can't remember if we have addressed this, but yes, it is both possible and designed to work as though devices are local to the hub serving up the UI.

So if you have a "Living" Hub that is your main hub with devices and related apps / rules for your living space, while "Antoun's" Hub has devices from your garage / man cave, you can share devices from Antoun's Hub with your Living Hub through Hub Mesh and include them in dashboards on the Living Hub as though they were paired with your Living hub. The reverse is true as well, you can control the rest of the home from your personal command centre :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

Simon

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Haha thanks Simon, love the idea of the command center :ok_hand: second HE it is.

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Depends on your hubs - if your original hub is a C-5 you could just leave the Zigbee devices on it. The ZB radio has not changed on the C-7.

Zigbee is the easiest to migrate because it does not have an internal DB stored on / tied to the radio chipset like Z-Wave. Basically backup/restore to a new hub then remove non-ZB devices and put new hub into pairing mode and go around and put each device into pairing mode. Make sure the original is offline when you do this though.

For the Z-Wave devices use the migration services (may have to remove any included Zigbee devices running on the other hub) or the following:

I forgot about this service. Thank you!

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