Recommendation for new hub

[sebby]

My trusty vera plus is starting to have some issues that are making me think that it is about to die. i now get constant luup reloads even though i've moved almost everything except for z-wave devices and the iphone locator off that machine. it is even booting off an ssd drive to minimize wear and tear on the internal memory. I've moved all my logic off box to MSR, so it is just a glorified zwave adapter. I would love to hear any ideas that would make moving 60ish devices off that box to something else as painless as possible. the thought of excluding and including the devices sends shivers down my spine, so anything that helps me migrate the network would be greatly welcomed. anyone have any suggestions?

[gwp1]

I, too, moved ~50 devices from my VeraSecure to my Hubitat. It wasn't as daunting as you think, tbh. I did it over the period of a couple months (from the sounds of things you may not have quite that long) but it's really just a matter of taking 15:, 20: a day and doing the needful.

For me, plugging them into the existing rulesets was more painful - but even that wasn't awful.

[Alan_F]

I also recently made the switch from VeraPlus to Hubitat, and now have some very simple rules running on the Hubitat and more complex rules running on MSR and Node-Red.

I had some flood/leak sensors that I bought in anticipation of them being integrated into the next Vera firmware release, and then that release never came out of beta. Then I had an issue with devices disconnecting that was probably related to the Vera running out of storage space. Support was able to fix it, but that was the thing that pushed me over the edge to make the platform switch. I'm still maintaining a VeraPlus with a pretty simple setup at my parents' house, and plan to keep that one running as long as it keeps working with my old one serving as a backup if theirs ever fails. My VeraPlus is still powered on for the moment, but there are no z-wave devices on it, all it is doing is logging some data into Datamine2.

It took a few days and some searching online to figure out some quirks on the Hubitat, but there is enough of a user community that I have always quickly found a thread that pointed me in the right direction. I was able to recreate everything I was doing on the Vera and more.

The biggest plus for me is that I have some Sengled Zigbee lights and the VeraPlus Zigbee hub didn't work with their RGB functions, so I had to have a Sengled hub connected to those. While I could do some integration to them via the Sengled API and Python scripting, they were totally cloud dependent. Within a week of getting them connected locally to the Hubitat, Sengled had an extended server outage that would have left those lights uncontrollable (other than the wall switch) for a day or so. Since they're connected to the Hubitat, the outage didn't affect me.

So my setup now is a Hubitat C-7 and a RPi4 that is running Node-Red on 'bare metal', plus Reactor, InfluxDB / Chronograf / Telegraf (which I haven't had time to figure out yet), Portainer, MQTT, and Gotify (for self-hosted push notifications) running under Docker.

When you count Z-Wave, Zigbee, WiFi lights, virtual devices, device groups, smart home speakers, and phone apps - all of which count as devices on the Hubitat - I have 80 devices on the hub.

[wmarcolin]

Hi @sebby

Come be happy with Hubitat, unfortunately, we have been orphaned by Vera, who was useful to us for a long time, but the new owners have buried her evolution.

I am two weeks into the moving process, my first impression of the Hubitat is excellent, I have to migrate almost 100 devices, and it has been a lot of work. First I have to find the manual on the internet, show how to reset to factory settings, and then add to Hubitat, but it is worth the sacrifice, the perception I have that now the devices respond better, and of course my biggest problem with S2 devices that did not work on the Vera, now they all work on Hubitat. I won't even talk about Zigbee which never worked on the Vera.

The biggest work I am having is adjusting about 80 routines I have in MSR, I don't use anything in the hub, even a simple rule of opening a door and turning on a light I am using MSR. I am doing this to ensure that the hub is as light as possible. When deleting from Vera, I have to search in MSR where I used the device and adjust for the new one in Hubitat. Now there is a good thing, over time I have improved my rules, so in this device tuning revision, I have made improvements and optimizations.

@Alan_F 's comment about the community is also important, they have a collection of discussions that help a lot in the first steps, I find it hard to search for things, but when I find it, it has been useful in understanding the installation of devices, or APP that can help.

Now there are some critical points about Hubitat in my opinion:

• The Z-wave antenna power is lower than the Vera, and this forced me to have repeaters, which did not exist before;
• In another thread, I comment on the lack of control over device failure. In the Vera if a device does not respond in a certain time, there is a failure indication, in Hubitat it seems that it is an APP, I have not reached this point yet;
• I am already missing @toggledbits 's Switchboard Plugin, it seems that there is also an APP to do this, but again, you have to look in the community;
• The dashboard out-of-the-box is very simple and practical, but you have to assemble everything, and the ease with which Vera already has everything ready is over, even with limitations, it at least facilitates the general management of devices. Maybe there is also an APP, I still have to find out;
• Finally, it is not a big problem, but the automatic integration of MSR with Vera helps a lot. In Hubitat there is a publishing process that bothers me, I hope one-day @toggledbits can align with Hubitat people and have it straight.

In summary, the change is in my opinion almost inevitable, there is work to be done, but so far I think the results have been good and the effort acceptable for the benefit of having more stability, better and more complete new device drives.

Thanks.

[PerH]

I went from VeraPlus to the combination openLuup(lead), Z-Way and Domoticz, with MSR for automation. Mostly because i was happy with the openluup interface, and there was good integration to Z-way, which is one of the best z-wave handlers i think. Haven't seen any other that match the "Expert" panel in z-way..

Domoticz has a very good plugin for Zigate, and some other integrations like Tibber and Xiaomi vacuum. RFXtrx433 is hooked to openLuup directly for temperature sensors.

Not the simplest path, but it's working very well! I could probably simplify this with i.e. Home assistant, but when i tried it, the zigbee pluigns weren't up to speed in my opinion.

[sebby]

thanks all for the feedback. I will check out Hubitat and see how it does.

[Black Cat]

I went for Homeseer, I liked you could run it local either on Windows or roll your own PC with 30 days to try it out.
Horses for courses, what suits one doesn't suit the other.