I have several outdoor Z-wave plugs that I use for automating my holiday decorations. After the holiday, these may sit in the drawer until next Christmas time.
I’m curious how do you handle these types of devices in your environment? Do you exclude them, then re-include later? Or do you simply ignore them? Or do you have a better plan that I’m not thinking of? 
you can either hide or disable them, I would also probably put them in a seasonal group.
Good question!
I manage the display and automation side of things via an input_select helper, eg
But on the Z-wave side I don’t have a good solution, and the devices show up as 
, so hoping to find good ideas here…
Yes, I have a similar issue. I run an “unavailable entities” automation every morning and review it to see if anything isn’t behaving, then fix it. Even disabling these Z-wave devices, their entities show up as unavailable.
Ha. I just took my z-wave switches for outdoor lighting down yesterday. Now Spook is complaining…
I used to just exclude them. Using SmartStart makes it easy to add back in.
I did something else different this year: I used a spare Rpi4 and a Zooz ZAC93 GIPO module to run a remote z-wave js UI instance for my outdoor lights. Then I just removed that “hub”. I might delete the automations (they were not that complex) but I might also replace the lights in my group with a dummy to make Spook happy.
