After a couple days I completed much of the work to migrate my system from a 10+ year old controller to my new Hubitat C8 Pro. I thought I would share the experience.
- The first issue I had was to get the integration for my monitored Honeywell Vista alarm panel. This was the open item that held me back from swapping over to Hubitat. I wanted parity with my old system where successful deadbolt keypad pins would disarm the alarm and turn on devices based on time of day. More details about that here: Hubitat Control of Monitored Honeywell Vista (-250) Alarm Panel via Envisalink 4
- The next issue was migrating some 65-70 Z-Wave device of various vintage. Since my system was 10+ years old and as with many of us it was a work of art where the paint never dried. Always something new or modified. And therein was the first problem. Some of my ZWave devices were so old they wouldn't pair with Hubitat. My Leviton Vizia RF+ dimmers wouldn't pair. So for now they are still on my old controller until the next Zooz sale where I can pick up 12 Zen77s to replace them.
- I had a few "one off" switches in the system of older vintage so I chose just to swap some of them out. Manufacturers that didn't stick around mostly, such as Intermatic and Cooper. They were 1st gen Z-Wave with 100 series chipset in them. In the bin they went.
- One of the most frustrating tasks was finding all the include and exclude sequences for the many different devices. I spent far too much time searching the web for old user manuals. Too bad ZWave doesn't prescribe a uniform way to do this but hopefully it is something seldom performed.
- One tip that helped in the end was not to unpair the devices from the old controller. Instead I just did an exclude in Hubitat before the include and that seemed to be smoother. Exclude seems to work very reliably in Hubitat. I just did hard deletes in the old controller since it isn't long for this world.
- I put Hubitat into WiFi mode and put it on a 100' extension cord so I could roam around the house to do the exclude and includes. I know Hubitat and newer chipsets don't strictly need this but it wasn't difficult and resulted in few problems.
- I had some issues with ghost devices halfway through so I switched to Z-Wave JS and that allowed me to refresh and remove the rogue devices when the native ZWave wouldn't display the remove button. Z-Wave JS also showed a couple more ghosts than the other did which was odd.
- I then had to transfer all my automations over and this was a big plus for Hubitat. My old system didn't allow very complex scenes unless you added a third party plug-in (which I did years later). I've been using Hubitat in another home for almost 2 years so have become reasonably adept at Rule Machine. It was a pleasure rewriting these under RM in a fraction of the time it would have taken in the old environment.
- Had a scare earlier today when >50% of the Z-Wave devices got lost in the system and status was shown as unknown instead of the green check mark. I tried to repair a few nodes to no avail and then did a reboot. Then I power cycled the house to reset all the devices hard wired. After another Hubitat reboot the Z-Wave devices all came back plus two new ghosts. SO I deleted the two ghosts and did a backup. Things have been stable ever since but it was 30 minutes of mild panic thinking 2-3 days of including might have to be redone...
- I still a have to move over another 4 light fixtures to dimmers from the old Vizia RF+. Two of the fixtures have three dimming locations (4way) and the other two are dual dimming locations (3way). I plan to use the Zooz virtual 4 way dimming mode like I do at my other location. It allows multi location dimming with the same user experience at each switch location. Its $450 worth of devices so I'll wait for a Zooz sale....
The majority of the work is done on the physical side. Most of the rules are done as well but due to improved flexibility with RM, I am sure to enhance a few things. I need to get going to build out the dashboards for the system. I did my other house in the standard dashboards and lots of time tweaking CSS code. I guess I'll give Easy Dashboard a try as while the past experience got me what I wanted it was pretty monotonous fiddling in CSS. I find dashboard construction one of the more serious Achilles tendon for Hubitat. Feels like circa 1980's coding. I get the feeling Easy Dashboard is only slightly better.
All good so far and very happy to be on a better maintained platform. Hopefully this helps some folks sitting on the sidelines not sure whether to jump in. I say just do it. Its a journey though and you learn a little bit with each step. Its definitely an evolution process so set your expectations accordingly and you won't get discouraged early on.
Thanks to those along the way with useful suggestions when I hit a couple road blocks. Also a shout out to JTP10181 for the excellent drivers for the Zooz product line.
