Hey everyone, I'm moving next month, and wanted to know what the best strategy is for my hubitat and all my devices. Do I need to wipe my database? Should I unpair all my devices? Should I just figure it out when I get there? Happy to hear from anyone with ideas or who has experienced this.
Are you planning on taking many of your devices along?
I have NOT moved since starting this but in my head I'd just shut it down and start physically removing devices with a "pill sorter" box of labels to be stuck to the devices as they come out.
I'd install dumb switches and outlets back in the holes and that would be that.
At the new place, I'd go into a room, say the Kitchen, look thru my box of devices and anything labeled Kitchen, I'd try and find a place for them. They'd have remained paired, of course. On and on til I ran out of devices... or rooms 
Turn on Hubitat and do 2-3 ZWave Repairs and then start with discarding Rules and renaming devices to match the new home.
In other words, I'd try and retain the ZWave Joins already working. Zigbee would be a bunch simpler I imagine.
Maybe my ideas are due to having 140+ devices that I really don't want to take through the Exclude Include process.
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I rent, so definitely taking everything with me. I have far fewer devices, about 25, all zigbee. It's definitely different although I don't have a strong desire to spend a whole day factory resetting everything and then pairing. Hopefully rule machine 4.0 comes before I move so I can clone all the rules with new device names. But you think my mesh will rebuild just fine with a new physical layout even without factory resets?
Zigbee mesh rebuilds as a result of NOT finding a controller. Ignoring the move for a moment, you'd shut the hub for 20 min.. and all your zigbee devices go 'into panic mode' looking for a controller. Turn on the Hub, they all start to find it and rebuild the mesh.
"Turn off the hub for 20 min" <-- sounds like moving, right? You physically install the devices where you think they will do the most good and once 20 mins are up, turn on the Hub. You should see many devices show up right away... longer for the ones that need to hop through a repeater. By the next day, it will all be back, assuming the new place doesn't interfere with the mesh (By having a nice steel wall down the middle or be 3x larger, etc.)
"Turn off the hub for 20 min -- sounds like moving, right?" LMAO, I wish it was that easy. I get your point though. Does it matter what order i remove the hub/depower the devices. For example if I power down the hub first and my devices are still powered they are going to go into panic mode before I leave. Is that a problem? might they start routing to the devices that repeat and now take longer to rebuild when I arrive. (Although tbh as long as they reroute in that first day and everything runs in the morning nbd)
I'm not sure anyone understands how Zigbee chooses routes well enough to answer that question, but in the long term, I don't think there should be a problem. 
(Assuming, of course, that the Zigbee network can cover your new residence as well as your current one--so if it's a lot bigger or something, then that's different, and maybe you'll need more repeaters or different placement of your hub or existing devices.) I would give everything a bit of time in-place at your new residence before you start drastically changing automations or decide to test the limits of your current ones, but Zigbee is usually pretty good at this. Self-healing is the only option we have for Zigbee, besides the "panic mode" trick if you want to try to force things through repeaters, and if it works like it should, there shouldn't be much difference (compared to re-pairing everything in its new place) after things "settle down."
When I moved about a year ago, I did about what it sounds like csteele did: I kept track of which devices were where (e.g., I knew these were my kitchen bulbs and this was my kitchen motion sensor), then tried to put them back in roughly the same spot in my new house so I didn't have to re-do many automations. The reality, of course, was a bit different: I have rooms in my new house that I didn't have in my old house, and it turns out my new house has a lot more lights, but I was more or less able to keep some things working--and I didn't have to re-pair any devices.
So, from a network perspective, there shouldn't be any need to re-set and re-pair. But if you think labeling devices and trying to put everything back where it was is more work than just re-pairing everything, or if your new house is so different that your current automations won't be much good, the choice is yours. I'm not saying I made the right one. 
