One of my smartbubls finally died. I replaced it, and that's when the fun began. I had to go to 10 different rules and dashboard buttons to swap it out. I've had a similar situation in the past where a temp sensor went out. There needs to be a way to add a new device, then tell Hubitat to swap it in place of another device. Once that's done, the old device can be removed, and you could then go rename the one you just added, if you wanted it to have the same name.
1 Like
Have you seen Swap Apps Device? This works for all devices.
And, just for z-wave devices, you can use Replace a failed z-wave node - as described in the Hubitat Z-Wave Documentation.
3 Likes
This does not work with child devices. I had the same issue when I replaced some hue bulbs.
There's a way you can effectively "cheat" and do this swap within the Hue integration (and CoCoHue and possibly more) by doing some DNI tricks, but it is indeed true that child devices aren't supported with the Swap Apps Device tool. However, for directly-paired Z-Wave or Zigbee bulbs, I'm not aware of any that create child devices, so this is unlikely to be a problem for those. It's not clear what kinds of devices the OP was working with, but I'm guessing one of these or the other advice above could have helped with both.
But, yeah, sometimes you do need to do things the "old fashioned" way. 
2 Likes
What is the way to do it with hue bulbs? My entire house is hue connected with Cocohue and two things that make me nervous are the hue hub dying (no backup) and having to replace a hue bulb in the dozens of Hubitat rules I have
If you have CoCoHue and have both bulbs added, you can just swap the device network IDs (DNI) of the two bulbs, then remove the one you don't want (which will likely be the one that now has the DNI of the old bulb). This is because CoCoHue uses only the DNI to identify specific devices. In my experience, the built-in Hue integration seems to work the same way, but I have no insight into that so cannot tell you for sure that this is a good idea to try there (but can say that it worked for me in the past when I used it, and I'd guess it does something similar).
A note on DNI swaps: you cannot have two devices on the hub with the same DNI. So, while swapping them, you'll need to temporarily change one to something else entirely (e.g, add a "_" character to the beginning of one to make it easier to identify or something along those lines) or just change the one for the one you're eventually planning to delete to something weird/random -- if you're not really swapping the two around and just care to get the "new" one in, the one you delete will, of course, not end up mattering.
You can also just manually edit the DNI on the "old" device without adding the new bulb at all and going through this swap process; just replace the old Hue device ID with the new one. But the trick would be finding this ID without adding it, so it's probably easier just to add it. (The Hue app used to show this somewhere, but I don't think it does anymore. For anyone reading this well into the future, this will also likely change as CoCoHue converts to the Hue v2 API and device IDs become unweildy GUIDs and not one- or two-digit numbers, so adding the device will likely continue to be easiest...)
2 Likes
This topic was automatically closed 30 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.
