Best way to create a zigbee network / maximum number of devices

I’m about to receive my homey pro and am thinking about how I should setup my zigbee network. I have the following:

18 wall switches (aqara)
5 curtain motors (aqara)
49 lights (tuya)
a handful of battery powered sensors/wireless switches, possibly adding more in the future

  1. Correct me if I’m wrong, the first 15 devices I add to homey should be well spread out around the house, instead of the 15 closest to homey. Just wondering if it’ll be a problem adding the furthest device as a router if homey is not in the middle of my house.

  2. I read that there is limit to the number of zigbee devices that I can connect to homey. Instead of trying to connect all my devices to homey, would it be a better idea to perhaps connect my lights to a separate zigbee hub? Would the devices operating on the same zigbee frequency cause issues even though they’re not connected to homey’s zigbee network?

  3. Is homey able to indirectly control devices connected to a different zigbee hub? Would be a great feature if I could control the brightness/colours of my lights via homey but it’s something I could manage separately if need be (given the zigbee limitations).

Are those on zigbee?

What I would do, use a fixed wifi 2.4GHz channel, and then reset Homey’s zigbee. It’ll select a quiet channel.
Start with pairing the routers (mains powered devices), those extend the zigbee mesh.
Pair the first ones which are mounted closest to Homey, close to Homey.
Pair the other routers on their location working from near Homey to the ones further away.

The adviced workable limit is around 40 devices, some reported even 50 and 60.
If zigbee starts to respond slow, or random devices don’t respond, you’ve reached the limit.

A second zigbee hub’s channel can also be set from 11 to 24 (or 26).

Depends. A Hue bridge blends in with Homey, and a Tuya zigbee hub can control those devices using the Tuya Cloud app.
But those need LAN and internet (for Tuya, Hue also probably) too.

Not all zigbee brands are compatible though

yup they’re tuya zigbee lights

hmm I’ve set my 2 wifi APs to channels 6 & 11, so as not to clash with homey’s zigbee channel 11 (which is the same as wifi channel 1). If I were to use another hub, would be be better to place it on the same as one of my wifi channels or the same as homey’s?

I would use channel 13 or 14 for the 2nd zigbee hub