I live in an townhouse with 3 floors. I want to do home automation for my house using HA primary for energy saving, secondary for security/comfort. My first target is to sense temperature/humidity, window open/close, motion and actuate the heating/lighting system. My preferred choice is zigbee based sensors and zigbee/wifi based actuators.
Zigbee has limited range. In this case i will need zigbee/wifi hub in each floor, assuming zigbee/ wifi does not have a good coverage from 1st floor (wifi router , HA with RPI+HASSIO location) to 3rd floor.
If i need that what is the best option-> HA (RPI+HASIIO) as zigbee/wifi hub in each floor? Is this network topology (3 instance of HA) is supported by HA? Or there are other superior options to bring the complete house into one HA system assuming that i have availability of Ethernet connectivity by CAT6 or power line communication in each floor.
This might be interesting for lot of people like me who just started to architect there home automation using HA system.
If you’re thinking about Zigbee devices I’'d suggest to take a look here:
You might probably still set up one RPi per floor, but you wouldn’t need to run hass.io on each of them - Zigbee2MQTT would connect to your MQTT gateway (on your main Pi?!) directly so you don’t have to set up a whole ‘Master/Slave’ on hass.io via MQTT.
Drawback:
The number of devices per Zigbee2MQTT-dongle is limited (to 20, I think).
Don’t most hard-wired zigbee (and zwave) devices also act as repeaters?
In other words, using at least one hard-wired zigbee device (outlet or switch) per floor will ensure the mesh network is extended throughout the 3-level townhouse.
I am not familiar with Zigbee. I have a large home that I’ve automated with a similar goal. After several frustrations with Zwave, I deployed a mesh wifi and only use wifi based sensors now. Not all of them are integrated with HA so I’ve had to use a combination of HA and IFTT via webhooks to get it to work, but it has proven to be reliable.