I’d say go use a Vera Plus as a device controller which already have their big boy pants as being a Z-Wave Plus Certified Controller which Hubitat is not.
Doug, it’s pretty cool finding you here.
Speaking as a formerly happy HE Envisalink user who came to Home Assistant initially for Envisalink, I’ve found that all my HE Hub does now is make a great ZWave and Zigbee interface. With this integration, it’s darn near perfect. All the issues I was facing with slowdowns over time, etc, are gone. All the HE Hub does now is behave as a remote ZW/Zig interface, with all the logic in HA (and node-red).
So far at least, very happy with it.
I’ll also add that I first went TO Hubitat for ZWave support after giving up on the HA Zwave capabilities. The issues you’re having now sound similar to those I had a year ago with Zwave on HA.
+1 to the other comment on Vera, if you really can’t stomach leaving the HE hub running in your home anymore.
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You see no latency between the hubs and no slow down on HE?
Zigbee is fine on HA, have 0 problems and it’s lickity split. I’m keeping that over here. But I worry that I’ll continue to see rediculous latency using HE just for z-wave devices even without automation.
That’s why I left HE.
Had the HA snapshots worked properly, I might not be in this jam so deeply. I’m going to be looking for an external way to back up the docker, if there is such a thing.
Thanks all.
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Since I’m running in an Ubuntu VM sometimes I sleep better at night if I take a full FM Snapshot.
I’ve never been worried enough to shut the VM down and take a full backup of it, but that’s a good idea now that I’m typing it.
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None. I’ve been using HE as just a z-wave / zigbee hub for a couple of months and it’s been very solid. I haven’t had to restart the hub in weeks; I was having to restart it every few days when I was running other apps on it. The responsiveness has also remained consistently snappy.
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None. Like, literally none. I did measure it at one point last week in the 100 or so ms, but my method was far from scientific.
With nothing on the HE Hub except Zwave and Zigbee attached devices and maker APIs setup for Home Assistant and Node Red, the hub is as fast as you can hope, and it doesn’t seem to degrade at all over time (but we’ll see in a few weeks).
Certainly to the naked eye, turning a light on is the exact same speed if I ask the Hub web UI to do it, or have Node-Red tell Home Assistant which uses this integration to ask the Hub by MakerAPI.
I find the HE Hub Zwave approach far better than HA direct Zwave.
ymmv
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I found the same thing with other integrations. HE doing nothing but device control is stable and fast. Add other elements and then it goes downhill.
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Tp-link devices are unreliable on HA. Search the forums and many threads about them going unavailable.
I’ve added my tplinks back to HE.
I love this! HA drops the ball? Try HE. HE drops the ball? Try HA. It is great to get the strengths from one and avoid the cons of the other.
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I may eventually end up going this route as well i.e. using HE as my zigbee/zwave controller. At this point ZHA is working really well for me and the few zwave devices I have left work as well. There is only one item that would work better for me on HE at the moment and that’s my Lutron Aurora dials. I could use my spare Nortek stick on my HE hub just for that but I dont want 2 zigbee meshes unless its really necessary. If I’m going to use the stick on an HE box, I might as well move everything over and free up the I/O resources on my HA device.
I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it I guess. For right now, HA is my all-in-one. But I’m REALLY happy that this component (and the NR one as well) exists so I can easily make a hybrid solution if/when needed.
Edit: forgot to include lock code management as a plus on the HE side for me.
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What is there to work with on this? Other than battery level as it’s not used as a control point.
As you stated, in HA you only get the battery entity. You also get zha events that can be used to capture numeric “brightness” values. However the button pushes are very sporadic. I managed to get it “working” by binding it to the light component of my Hampton Fan controller. It works perfectly to control the fan light but does not update it’s state in HA when controlled via the dial. Things get out of sync and automation flake out a bit.
In HE, the dial can be synced directly to a device with an app (forgot the same). In my initial testing months ago, it worked quite well. There was a slight delay but not enough to be a problem for my use cases.
So you’re using the Aurora as a generic button? Hmm…
My simple HS105’s have been perfect.
I even blocked them from the internet and they work very fast.
Maybe you’ve got some more complicated devices giving you issues.
I took them out of Hubitat immediately when I switch to HA.
I’m tempted to move my Konnected panels back to HE, at least for a while, Since the konnected integration was updated in HA 0.106 the panels keep sporadically disconnecting from HA; they’re up and they’re working, but they just stop sending updates to HA (or HA stops paying attention to them).
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Kinda.
I want the best of both worlds. I need it to control the lighting of the room it’s in but also maintain control of that same lighting via HA or HE for automations. It work REALLY well when connected to my Hue hub (to control hue bulbs) and I used in in my daughter’s room for that purpose. When I swapped rooms with my office, I replaced the fans in both rooms and added the Hampton Bay Fan controllers. So…now I need to control the lighting via the Aurora and still have motion lighting, etc available. The binding in HA is a descent hybrid but like I mentioned, has sync issues. HE would allow me to use the Aurora to control the lighting through the hub so everything should sync fine.
So you’re using the Aurora to control the Hampton Bay Fan Controller Light device? This is where the sync is off?
If using the Aurora outside of the Hue bridge then HE probably has the better support. Have you tried it with deCONZ?
No, only with ZHA. I’m not sure it would be any better on deconz because the limitation appears to be on the zigbee reports coming out of the device. It’s really designed to control a zigbee bulb via direct pairing or through the Hue hub.
Mike at HE managed to get more functionality out of it by creating his custom driver and pairing it with the app…I think the app was called Mirror Me or similar. If Idecide to flip on the zigbee radio on my HEhub again, I’ll connect and test again.
Cool. I have an Aurora but I got it specific to use with the Hue lights in the dining room and no other intent for it.
I don’t know how to look for this kind of event, can you elucidate? Can NR be used here?