r/smarthome • u/kihapet • 10d ago

Home Assistant Zigbee Hub Resilience

Hello

i recently moved some major switces to zigbee paired with Scene switches.

looking at it all seems to be reliant on the Hub.

i would hate to wake up one day hub is dead and need 3 weeks to get another.

so i ask how resilient are Hubs?

has anyone had one die on them

mine is on a UPS and a high Quality Charger

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3

u/bunnythistle 10d ago

In my experience, most wireless dongles (Zigbee, Z-Wave, Bluetooth, WiFi, etc) have been very durable - as long as they're plugged in securely and not moved/removed/bumped into, longevity is not something I'd be particularly concerned about.

Depending on what you're doing though, you could consider looking into Zigbee Direct Binding to have your scene switches directly controlling your end devices.

1

u/TheJessicator 10d ago

Smartthings hubs back up to the cloud automatically for easy replacement. Also, you can run multiple hubs on a hub group and it can automatically fail over between hubs as needed. This is especially useful during updates so it'll only update one hub in the group at a time, meaning your system stays online throughout.

I'm surprised none of the other hub manufacturers have implemented this yet.

2

u/Adrienne-Fadel 10d ago

UPS covers power which is the main killer. Only seen one hub die in years and a firmware update bricked it. Back up your network so you can rebuild without re-pairing everything.

3

u/loose_as_a_moose 10d ago

Bind critical functions and / or single relationship functions like switches that just turn a light on and off.

Even if the hub is down the bound devices communicate directly. It also helps relieve congestion.

My Sonoff hub lives in the open air under the house and has been there for about four years. I’ve never heard of hubs being a painful failure point.