Proper planning of the placement for your hub will greatly improve the Zigbee and Z-Wave radio performance. Here are some tips one where to place your new Hubitat Elevation hub. Setting up your mesh network properly is as important as your hub placement. Repeaters (non-battery powered devices) are necessary for devices in most homes to work effectively. For more information on setting up Zigbee and Z-Wave mesh devices, see How to Build a Solid Zigbee Mesh and How to Build a Solid Z-Wave Mesh.
- Try to place your hub in a central location of your home whenever possible. While Zigbee and Z-Wave both claim to have enough range to cover most residential home sizes, the reality is that every wall, floor, piece of furniture, as well as other electronic interference will reduce their effective range. The more central you locate your hub, the more you can help reduce your need for Zigbee and Z-Wave repeaters. This range extends vertically, too, so if you place your hub in the basement you may have a harder time reaching the upper floors. Radio signals can also have trouble passing through cement and stucco, so you may need to rethink your hub placement or have strategically located repeaters to get past cement floors and walls.
- Hubitat Elevation works best with a good wired connection to your network. If it isn't possible to relocate your home networking equipment or run a cable to wire in your hub to a good location, consider using adding a mesh router or powerline adapters. Many mesh routers will allow a device like your hub to connect via the Ethernet port on one of the remote wireless nodes. Alternately, powerline adapters allow you to extend Ethernet connections by using a set of special modules to send data by converting Ethernet to transmit over your home electrical wiring. If a wired connection is still not possible, models C-8 and newer offer built-in Wi-Fi (presented during setup or accessible from Network Setup afterwards), while models C-5 and C-7 support adding a compatible WiFi adapter for similar functionality. However, Ethernet is always preferred.
- Maintain a minimum of 1 foot (0.3 meters) of separation between your router and hub to prevent potential interference to the Zigbee radio, which also operates the 2.4 GHz radio spectrum.
To avoid interference, do not locate your hub directly on top of (or directly underneath) your Wi-Fi router!
- Metal is not a friend of radio transmission. Zigbee and Z-Wave use radio frequencies that cannot pass through metal. Metal surfaces, structures and objects will reflect all radio signals and reduce their ability to travel long distances. Avoid metal shelves; large metal appliances, such as refrigerators; vehicles; etc.
- On hub models with external antennas, orienting the antennas roughly vertically tends to produce the most useful range.