We are nearing the completion of a 2 year remodel and I’m ready to give Home Assistant another try. A number of my Z-Wave devices are aging out and some are even failing, so it’s time for a significant update. I’ve purchased and installed a ZWA-2 and have a single ZEN32 800LR on the network. I plan to slowly migrate from the old Z-Net to the ZWA-2, hopefully without breaking what’s left of the old network in the process. EDIT: Over time I plan to replace one z-wave device at a time by removing the old device from the Z-Net, installing a newer 700 or 800 device, and adding it to the ZWA-2’s new network.
I’m working on creating a priority list as 1, 2, or 3.
1 - Must Have
2 - Should Have
3 - Nice to Have
Here’s a link to my post regarding my previous attempt at migrating.
HA has evolved significantly in the past four years. I think you’ll find it a very solid platform now, though of course there will continue to be different ways of thinking about things (and naming of things) compared with HS.
Your approach of slowly migrating over z-wave devices one at a time (or at least in small related chunks) is wise.
If you’re going to be replacing all existing old devices with new 700-800 series ones, you could theoretically aim for the new network to be completely “LR”, with no mesh involved. With the improved antenna on the ZWA-2, this might be an achievable and worthy goal.
As you saw from your previous 400+ comment thread, the community here is incredible! Keep us posted on your progress. Enjoy the ride and good luck!
Anyone wondering (like me) HS stands for “HomeSeer”:
HomeSeer Technologies LLC is a technology company based in Bedford, New Hampshire, in the United States. HomeSeer makes home automation controllers and software
Thanks for the welcome. I can see the maturity and growth of HA since the last time I visited it. TBH, I’ve been largely ignoring my home automation system for the last 2 years unless something broke, which happened a lot during construction. I think starting fresh with the ZWA-2 and in parallel will help, and yes, LR is the goal whenever possible. I need to spend some time finding suitable replacements for my old z-wave nodes. In some cases, I’ve removed failing nodes and replace the functionality with Zigbee devices, simply because the z-wave network was so fragile.
One big thing I need to figure out is how to create webpages with live HA entity data that look and feel like my current HS4 summary/status pages.
I have a lot of MQTT with an external broker so that should be relatively easy to add to HA , test new automations, and then disable in HS4.