Why Hub Link

Actually, Mike is running a separate hub for ZLL lamps. I would love to only have one hub, but I have a lot of OSRAM light strips and lamps, and they don't play well with the other zigbee devices. I have a total of about 370 devices, zigbee, z-wave, lutron (hub), Philips Hue (hubs). It is substantially less expensive to add a second hub instead of replacing the ZLL devices.

Edit - I should have said ZHA lighting, as the ZLL work with the Hue hubs.

There are a few reasons why someone would use two or more linked Hubitat Elevation hubs. Most common is indeed, to segregate ZLL devices - which are known to be lousy repeaters. Another is isolating cloud connected devices from local devices. And lastly, several customers use "developer " hubs linked to their production hubs.

Basically Hub Link was born based on customers' feedback that they wanted to slowly migrate their systems from SmartThings and needed a way to link the two. We have taken that idea one step further and made it possible to link two or more Hubitat Elevation hubs based on aforementioned needs :wink:

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And just so that we're 100% clear, those are exactly the situations I stipulated I was NOT talking about. If you read the whole post that was originally being quoted, I was specifically referring to the "many-hub" distributed processing model being advocated for here on the forum. I was not talking about a dev environment or a zigbee "penalty box", both of which are 100% valid (and highly recommended) reasons.

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I’m pretty sure that @bravenel has previously stated on here that he doesn’t believe a customer should need more than one HE hub to run their HA system. Of course, having a second hub for reasons @bobbyD specified don’t necessarily contradict that position. HE has been excellent at listening to the people using their hub and responding with features that are requested. That is why they developed hub link/link to hub to be able to connect multiple HE hubs. It was previously developed solely as an easy way to bring people over from SmartThings. I for one have a second hub to segregate my zigbee lights from end devices. I still run the majority of my automations from one hub.

In my case, I wanted to segregate my Iris 1st generation devices from the other devices (Iris 2nd gen, Bosch, Zen thermostat, etc.). I was having issues with Iris 1st gen together with everything else that were resolved when I put them on a separate hub and used Hub Link/Link to Hub to connect them. My home automation is run from the 1st hub. Even with the various firmware updates, my home automation has kept working with no slow-downs.

Again, Factually inaccurate. This is literally the first question on the announcement of the app

Whatever you want to believe, but here is the announcement from February 2018

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Announcing that Hub Link is "used for" integrating Smartthings is NOT the same as Hub Link was (as you put it) developed solely for integrating from Smartthings.

As noted it's "used for" is many such cases.

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I don’t usually get involved in these sorts of arguments but I was using these apps long before aug 18
The apps were created to aid transition from smartthings to hubitat before the hub was released
(They were originally created for @bravenel to help with his transition, I believe)
One of my early posts in this forum was regarding its use and I asked if this would also work for HE -> HE

In March 18, I posted this...

Bruce responded by giving me the code to play with and advising how it could be adapted to work for two HE hubs

I then adapted the ST side to work using two HE hub for my personal use.
In a later firmware release the same adaptations were included in the ‘new’ app

Andy

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It's no problem Andy, you're not arguing with me, I screen shot their replies. It's literally Bruce's own words.

I personally don't care either way

I don't even get what we're arguing about... Whether hubitat endorsed or didn't endorse multiple hubs is really irrelevant.

  • Do you absolutely need multiple hubs? No.

  • Can you use multiple hubs if you want to, for whatever reason you think it'll help with? Yes.

  • Does Hubitat provide the tools to use multiple hubs together? Yes.

  • Do you have to use the tools? No.

(Should I have just ignored this thread if I had nothing useful to contribute to the conversation? Yes. :wink: )

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It's not an argument, its about seeing the pattern that routinely happens in this forum .

There is a problem with Zwave locks on hubitat > No problem it's your device/environment > But the device has been working fine for 2 years, and I can rejoin it to my previous platform and it still works > That's not a relevant comparison your device/environment is the problem > But the device still works fine there > don't matter it's not hubitat issue.

HubLink was created solely for X > But these posts say its intended use is multiple use cases like Y, and in fact to run mutliple hubitat hubs > Doesn't matter what those posts say it was done for X

MANY MANY more examples could be given.

Yes, which also does not count as a second Hub since it would be akin to running a hue bridge for ZLL bulbs. The intent is to segregate the devices on a separate zigbee mesh, not to divide any workload the hub has to do.

I'm more than happy to have the debate about multiple hubs but please don't try and say that anyone at Hubitat is advocating to run multiple hubs because that simply is not the case.

@bobbyD I don't know why the posts are out of order now....but it makes this a very different conversation. Can you please fix that?

PLEASE observe the timestamps on these posts as the one just above this should actually be post #2. Thank you.

Must be a slow Thursday. Can't wait to have my 4 hubs running with Hubconnect. :woozy_face::fire::boom:

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