I have a few zigbee plug-in outlets that I use to automate my Christmas lights. How bad is it for my mesh to simply unplug those outlets and leave them unplugged until the next Christmas season?
Is it better to pause or disable my Christmas rules until next Christmas?
Eh, Zigbee will probably be fine (especially if you have other Zigbee routers/"repeaters" in your mesh, which I'm guessing was fine before you added this one).
That being said, I also like to disable or otherwise stop my automations (either manually or with a virtual switch or other mechanism as a restriction). That way, they aren't triggered year-round for no good reason, filling up my logs with their trigger events (if logging is enabled, as it often is for me) or otherwise making my "real" automations harder to troubleshoot. And with a completely missing device, as in your case, it will save your Zigbee network a bit if panic trying to find something that doesn't exist.
(I put my "real" devices in RL or Groups and Scenes groups and remove them from my hub, likely because by next year I'll have changed my mind about what device I want to use where or how I want to automate things, then I don't touch my actual automations, just this one app -- but that might be more than you want to do...)
Download the Hubitat app
