I'm trying to cover all of our house, an outdoor area that includes a small pool, and a shed. I currently have a hubitat inside, but it can't cover the outdoor areas. I am looking to run some power out to those areas, and I'm going to run network cabling while I'm at it. If I add a hubitat at each of the remote areas, is that easy enough to connect together with my current unit and make one large system? I'm guessing that the hub connect system is what this is for.
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Yes, you'd need both power and Ethernet to each location that you'd like to install a Hubitat hub.
How far from the main house are these remote locations?
What type of devices will be needed in the remote locations?
Answers to these two questions will greatly influence whether or not a multiple hub design or warranted or not.
Another way to reach distant areas is to use Zigbee and/or Z-Wave repeater devices to build out a large Zigbee and/or Z-Wave mesh network. Mains powered devices, like plug-in smart outlets and in-wall switches/dimmers will act as signal repeaters to extend the reach of their respective mesh networks.
I would use the native, built-in "Hub Mesh" feature to tie multiple Hubitat Hubs at a location together. It is very simple and easy to set up and have device from one hub appear on another hub, with full 2-way communications over the LAN.
Note: "Hub Connect" is a community developed solution, whose original goal was to tie SmartThings and Hubitat together. It is also able to tie multiple Hubitat hubs together, but the recent "Hub Mesh" feature, which is now part of the Hubitat platform, has really mostly obsoleted that need. And since ST is planning on shutting down their Groovy IDE, eventually "Hub Connect" will no longer run on ST in its current incarnation.
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If you could wait a while, the Zwave Long Range is supposed to be able to reach to these type places. And Hubitat theoretically does or will support the LR devices. Issue is, there aren't any LR devices yet.
The Hub Mesh works good, and it is a native (built-in) app. If you have multiple hubs, this is the easiest way to share devices.
Hubitat does have some optional Wifi devices you can use instead of ethernet. There are details in documentation as to what devices to purchase. I wonder if Hub Mesh works with the Wifi option? I assume yes, but I haven't heard of anyone doing that.
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Hub connect is also used to tie multiple HE hubs together that are on different LAN's. This allows you to use one or more dashboards that have multiple locations in one dashboard. I had also been using it as well with my ST's hubs but none of them are any longer plugged in and running.
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I have a situation similar to yours. Three buildings on the property, and despite many attempts to use a repeater to bridge the "gap", I could never make it work. Just having three Hubitat devices solved it. Personally, I don't use the mesh capability. I just have each building function independently, and haven't had an issue from that. I also found that a powerline ethernet extender worked well in terms of giving the Hubitat device an ethernet connection. I later replaced it with a hardwired ethernet line because I wanted some cameras in that distant area, but it wasn't needed for the hub as it didn't care how it got its hardwired IP.
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