I have a C8-pro I upgraded to a year or so ago - and have my old G5 collecting dust. I realize it is registered to my name - but I have a friend who is interested in Hubitat and home automation at work that I wanted to let borrow my old hub. I did a soft reset on it - as I do not see a hard reset option. All of my zigbee and zwave were migrated to my C8-pro long ago. After the soft reset there are no devices or identifiable information that I can see - is it safe to give to my coworker to play with - or do I need to reach out to support to get the device removed from my account first or such? I do not have any subscriptions or cloud access - only the hub to gift to a friend. What's the proper SOP for this?
Do a full reset from the Diagnostic tool. If you haven't used that C-5 for a while, it may have an older version of the Diagnostic Tool, which will have to be updated before you do a Full Reset.
Read the section titled "What about a Full Reset" on this page from the Hubitat documentation:
If I do a full reset (if it's available now) - can I let my coworker borrow it without any issues with their own setup - and can I factory reset it after he is done and take possession again without conflict? No existing data leakage discoverable by loaning this out after a full reset?
If you update the diagnostic tool, and ensure the hub in question has no active subscriptions (like hub protect or cloud backups) assigned to it, then you should be able to fully reset the hub.
Your friend can do the same when he’s done with it.
There’s nothing of yours (or theirs) on the hub at that point.
Consider the possibility that your friend might not have the same experience as most Hubitat users do these days while test driving a C5, though.
It’s an older hub without latest z-wave and zigbee radios/firmware, and its CPU/RAM are less beefy than the newest hub model.
I have the same quandary related to "how helpful is it to bequeath a dated hub?"
I have a C-3 a couple C-4's, a couple C-5's as well as two (soon to be 4) C-7's and a C-8 all gathering dust. I'll be all C-8Pro's by the weekend (4 of them) and my Dev hub migrates to a hand-me-down C-8.
I've been on the verge of saying "Let me just send you one of my old hubs...." to co-workers more than a couple times, but never, so far.
I just don't think the Hub cost is the dominant factor in experimenting with Home Automation. It's not zero factor, but buying Z-devices is the big hurdle, especially if they know too little. Such as "Don't start with a Lock" as your first purchase.
One concern would be that even after a factory reset, the hub may still have the users cloud connected devices sending data to your hub uid via the cloud. They would have to clear that up on their end as the hub uid is not changeable. Think integrations like Ecobee, Google Home, etc...
This traffic in the past has caused lockups, and is not easy to determine what is still sending to the hub.
Funny you said don't start with a lock... I got a friend to buy a C8 pro to start his automation and the first thing he wanted was a lock and the second, a zen 16 for his garage door. The saving grace was that he brought his whole kit. Hub and lock, a contact switch, and the Zen16 to me and we got it all working bread board style in my dining room. Then boxed it and he took it home and installed it. He is very tech savy too though.
The full reset should totally wipe everything off the hub including any registration. Here are instructions for how to force the Diag tool to update (very bottom of page): Hubitat Diagnostic Tool | Hubitat Documentation
If needed you can also de-register it from your account
