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Help Selecting Smart Lighting Platform


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1 hour ago, zaphod said:

Why do some of you folks have so many Hue hubs?  Is it due to a maximum number of lights per hub?  Or is it to get a decent signal throughout a larger house?

I did it for better signal throughout the house as 1 bridge couldn't hit the entire house plus all of the outside as I have just as many outdoor Hue lights as I do indoor.  I primarily did it though a few years ago for redundancy as I was having an issue where my Hue bridge would die after about 6 months constantly, like just fully dead and I'd have to replace it and reprogram all my lights from scratch which literally made me want to shoot myself.  That happened at least 3 or 4 times over a 2 year period.  Got frustrated with that a few years ago so split the network up over a few bridges so at least if one failed I wouldn't have to reprogram everything (and of course not one failure since lol, not that I'm complaining!).

I mostly just use 2 of them, I have one that's my Indoor Bridge for indoor lighting, and then my second one is the Outdoor Bridge which is in the garage and used for landscaping and outdoor Hue lights.  I have a 3rd one in the theatre which has a few lights connected to it (had bought a spare one and forgot to return it lol but it's not really necessary).

The Hue app makes it easy to switch bridges so it's really not a big deal having multiple at all.

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Not really signal, although at this point it would be a problem at my place. 

1) The Hue hubs start getting a little glitchy post 55 lights.  Sometimes you can add more lights, sometimes not.  Hue labs formulas take up memory, so fewer lights.  Adding extra apps to the hub (Hue Sync, Hue Disco, etc) takes up memory.  Also, if you need to add "just one new lamp" etc, it's nice to have the added space.   Given that you can often get a starter kit at a lower price than buying individual bulbs, I ended up with extra hubs anyway. 

2) Signal would be an issue for me now. I have outdoor hue lights in the front and back, so signal is a good reason.  Fewer mesh hops = better reliability. 

3) When you make a C4 light group, most of the time it ends up deleting all the rooms on the hub.  This is a nice way to not have to redo your whole house. 

4) I also have 350+ hue lights.  So that's a lot of it.

 

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59 minutes ago, Andrew luecke said:

50 apparently.. And apparently you can get it up to 63

 

Also, I have maybe 10 bulbs, but thinking of switching to another brand for the others

Which brand?  I just got a govee lamp that I'm going to try.

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12 hours ago, zaphod said:

Is there a max in terms of bulbs per hub?

one that was not mentioned. These are a zigbee device which is a mesh network. At some point you just have to many nodes and too many ways for the data to travel back to the hub. Having so many paths can cause the data to jump around and get lost or cause a lot of latency. Depending on how good the mesh is you can have larger sizes too. Control4 will recommend no more than 100 devices to a single mesh but you can do more if needed, but some may experience issues. It's also a good rule of thumb that if a room has a lot of devices in a small space you may want to segregate them to their own mesh for the same reasons as above.

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16 hours ago, Andrew luecke said:

50 apparently.. And apparently you can get it up to 63

 

Also, I have maybe 10 bulbs.. No problems, but thinking of switching to another brand for the others

Why do you want to switch brands?

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On 4/28/2022 at 12:21 PM, Matt Lowe said:

one that was not mentioned. These are a zigbee device which is a mesh network. At some point you just have to many nodes and too many ways for the data to travel back to the hub. Having so many paths can cause the data to jump around and get lost or cause a lot of latency. Depending on how good the mesh is you can have larger sizes too. Control4 will recommend no more than 100 devices to a single mesh but you can do more if needed, but some may experience issues. It's also a good rule of thumb that if a room has a lot of devices in a small space you may want to segregate them to their own mesh for the same reasons as above.

If you have dozens of Hue bulbs and dozens of C4 devices is there a possibility that you run out of spectrum?  And doesn't Zigbee also use the 2.4GHz band that Wifi uses? And other devices?

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On 4/29/2022 at 2:52 PM, zaphod said:

If you have dozens of Hue bulbs and dozens of C4 devices is there a possibility that you run out of spectrum?  And doesn't Zigbee also use the 2.4GHz band that Wifi uses? And other devices?

you do but depending on the size of your home and your project you would just position each server and each wap on different channels and overlap as little as possible.

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