Two years ago I made the horrible mistake of going with Hubitat instead of HA. One of the main reasons was that Hubitat had the easy ability to mesh two hubs together.
Well, that’s about the only thing that works well with Hubitat. Now, two years later I am moving all my devices and rules over to HA.
I’m pretty much done now except for my Zwave devices.
My issue is, I have two buildings on the property located a fair distance a part. There’s fiber between the buildings so there’s a reliable IP network between them.
In the main building I have a ZWA-2 and an SLZB-MR4U to handle Zwave, Zigbee, and Matter/Thread.
Now I need that capability at the remove building. I have ordered a SLZB-Ultima to handle those devices at the remote building.
Now the question is, how to integrate that device into my existing HA setup? I’m running HAOS on Proxmox.
Should I set up a completely new HAOS instance to connect the Ultima to, and mesh it using HA Remote access? Or should I set up Zwave JSUI in a container? What about Zigbee and Matter/Thread? How does HA handle multiple Zigbee and Thread/Matter controllers/networks?
Multiple Zigbee is easy, you can mix and match ZHA / Z2M or run two instances of Z2M. I don’t use Z-wave and my Matter experience is limited so I got no input on that.
I know you can connect remotely to another zwave instance. I have a dev-machine that is remoted into the main house zwave. Instructions are in the forum here somewhere. I don’t know if a single HA can talk to 2 zwave instances though. I bet you can, but don’t know that for sure as I have never tried it.
I’m thinking an instance ox zwavejs-ui and another of zwavejs talking to different controllers sounds possible.
I have two Home Assistant servers on the same network, each with their own Zigbee and Z-Wave radios. One does all the heavy lifting, and the one in the outbuilding is a lightweight fanless mini PC that runs a miniminal configuration.
You can add as many instances ZwavejsUI you desire. I’m sure there may be some limit but not an issue here. They will work seemlesy.
Each zwave controller requires a ZwavejsUI instance. Remote instances may be run on low cost hardware like raspberry Pi
If you ran a HAOS instance at the remote location it would still be possible to connect that instance to you main HA install. I personally have not done this but nothing prevents it so that may be is easiest to maintain solution and additionallly give you ability to have a local HA instance at remote location that only controls that location