Hello!
As stated in the title I’m moving to a new house soon™ that will change my home assistant instance a lot.
I was wondering what would be better… Start from scratch or adapt what I have? I have some information in HA that I want to preserve but most of it could go away.
Have you any experiences in this situation? Any insights?
Thank for reading!
I’d archive my current setup and then start a new one, but port over config as needed.
A bigger question is, what about the hardware? Generally once is supposed to include anything hardwired with the sale of a house but I can’t really see a new owner wanting a bunch of custom IoT stuff tied to wireless instances and a control system that no longer exists (and neither would be giving them your Linux controller and router likely be great).
In my place I’d probably end up having to pull a bunch of smart switches and plugs that are running custom firmware and replace them with their “dumb” counterparts
I started from scratch when I moved. No regrets. Fair warning, I also upgraded/replaced a lot of stuff, so it made sense to start over.
That is why I’m thinking about starting from scratch. I’m going from a small flat to a house and everything is going to change A LOT. I’d like to move HA from the pi4 to a small home server but that’s for later, I have too many thing in my plate right now.
Thanks for your input!
I would start from scratch, BUT I would reuse pieces as they made sense. Copy over things as needed, but not wholesale.
I think it depends on how happy you are with the current setup. I have a bunch of old half finished junk for testing and no longer used entities so I would definitely start from scratch, but your situation may differ. At the very least I’d back up everything and export (including copying the Lovelace/dashboard yaml to a text file) it before starting over.
Same thing is happening to me. I even have some old stuff from Android devices that no longer exist and your comment just reminded me about it. I think I might start from scratch saving what I think is worth.
Thanks
Starting from scratch can indeed be a rewarding way to learn something new and expand use cases. However, it often involves significantly more work and could lead you down a complex rabbit hole. What about ensuring that you have enough room for wiring and opting for as much open technology as possible, then progressing from where you stand?
It would be interesting to learn about your current setup, technology, and use cases.
Best of luck!
I’m really thinking about starting from scratch. The rabbit hole kind of scares me but at the same time it’s exciting 😂.
I think I have room to grow in the new home and I always try to get things with local integration and as open source as possible.
My setup right now is in a small flat, with 3 or 4 automations and a very small amount of sensors. The new home is going to be very very different. I have a lot of plans, maybe too many of them. So maybe staying from scratch is the way to go.
Thanks for your input
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i start by making a detailed plan first. without more information on what you have its really hard to say. but for anything recent id probably try and keep while ditching the older stuff. theres nothing wrong with saving money where you can but trying to migrate an existing setup can be a pain too.
I recently moved, and did not start over from scratch, as I had most of the same rooms/sensors/setup. It went well! I added in new rooms and sensors as necessary. I did recently move from the Nortek combined stick to a separate SONOFF 3.0 for Zigbee and a Zooz 800 stick for Z-Wave, which also went well, but left things named a bit oddly. Reading some of the other comments about how often they blow out their environment makes me think maybe I should!
I’d consider the automations/dashboards you’ve made. Those likely could be reused if you wiped the main instance and started over. I’d lean towards making a backup and starting from scratch. If it’s too much, just use the backup!
i went from an apt to a house and debated this. i did not start from scratch. i had to move some devices to different areas, but a lot of the same automations i liked i was able to move over and just change some devices. my dashboards changed of course to accodate a different space but naming of things was still familiar, all the add ins, and other stuff was still there, just a lot less to have to set up again.
for me there’s a ton of little things that probably i would have to re-learn to set up, easier just to leave it be and move it around to whatever new room it needs to be in.
Starting from scratch even if everything is nearly the same since HA changes so fast it will clean out any conversions, backward naming standards etc.
I think the way my z-wave devices where named by default has changed 3 times since I have been using HA early on. HA migrated these names each time, but new devices show up differently. Also all sorts of deprecated stuff still in parts of my config etc.
I will probably be moving in the next year and plan to replace a lot of my BASE devices with more reliable options then layer in the old ones, or the old ideas with new devices.
I blow away and redo my instance once every 6 months or so, because it gets cluttered with entities and settings and things that I’m constantly messing with and adding/removing (especially testing homemade ESP32 devices, I have like 12 ghost entities in there from that right now). It should’t take you more than a couple hours even with a large amount of devices.
