I finally got tired of having multiple hubs, bridges, and random boxes running different parts of my smart home, so I moved everything into one Home Assistant installation.
The old setup was a mix of:
- Philips Hue hub
- IKEA hub
- Homebridge on a Raspberry Pi
- Home Assistant on an old Mac mini
- Various bulbs, switches, blinds, sensors, plugs, etc.
I was a bit concerned about scale. I’ve had problems in the past running 50+ devices on a single hub, so moving 100+ devices into one system felt a bit brave.
So far, it has been surprisingly solid.
A couple of observations:
- The migration was less painful than expected. Compared to the old IKEA way of pairing devices, this was actually pretty quick and simple.
- I expected odd devices like IKEA roller blinds to be difficult to use outside the IKEA ecosystem, but they were very easy to pair and use.
- Dimmer switches were more manual than I expected since they don’t really “do” anything by default. I was expecting Home Assistant/ZHA to recognize the switch and apply some kind of template. Having to capture
zha_eventdata feels a bit clumsy, but using AI to generate the automations helped. - One thing I hadn’t really considered before: multiple hubs also means multiple Zigbee networks. Moving everything into one setup gives me one larger Zigbee network instead, which seems to make coverage and routing more predictable so far.
The biggest win is probably reduced complexity. Fewer hubs, fewer systems to recover after a power outage, and fewer places where something can silently break.
I’m still curious how this holds up long-term, especially with Zigbee routing and stability across the house.
For those running larger Home Assistant setups:
How many devices are you running on one instance, and did you hit any stability limits at some point?
I also documented the process here in case anyone is interested:
Home Assistant & n8n on the ZimaBoard 2