I suspect this has been covered before, so I apologize in advance for missing prior discussions that likely exist, but I haven’t been able to find quite what I’m after.
If one has a device that’s included in multiple routines, and wants to replace it, what’s the most efficient way to do so? As a specific example: suppose I have a zigbee garage-door sensor and want to replace it, perhaps with a Z-wave model. After adding the new sensor to Smartthings, is there a way to select the old sensor and ask Smarttings to replace all references to it within routines to the new sensor?
There’s no easy way to replace a device with another but there are some shortcuts.
The easiest method I found is deleting the device from SmartThings, then in routines section the “broken” routines will appear with a red exclamation and you can pick a replacement device in each routine.
BUT note that this method does not work with button actions, if you’ve assigned actions directly to buttons in the button view and you delete the device, the actions with that device are deleted and you will not be warned at all that there are broken actions. I guess the same goes to any other routine not made from the routine section.
And that’s why I stopped assigning actions with devices directly to the buttons. Instead, I create manually run routines and use those in the button actions. When you delete the device, the manually run routine will be marked as broken so you can easily replace the device while the button action is still associated to the manually run routine.
Thank you for such a clear and helpful reply, especially as you anticipated what I might do next which is to replace an aging Smartthings button with a newer model. (Getting off-track, but the motivation is that the Smartthings button is running through batteries quite quickly. I’m not yet sure, however, if this is real, perhaps due to a inefficient driver, or the result of buying cheap 2450 batteries from Amazon that would be dieing quickly in any device.)
I was actually thinking on the device actions but the same goes for the button itself.
For instance, if you assign turn on a light to Pressed in the button device view. If you delete that light controlled by the button, since the automation was created on the button view it will just be gone. If it’s made as a normal routine “If button is pressed, Then turn on light”, when you delete the light or the button it will still be displayed as a broken routine and you can replace the device.
Sometimes I just use the search bar to look for routines that include the old device (sometimes I even change its name so it’s easier to get the results) and manually change them one by one until there’s none and then I delete the old device.
Note that manually run routines will not appear under “Routines that include this device” so that tab is incomplete.
So far the only way I’ve found to really know where a device is used is searching in the routines section or in the advanced website under the “In use by” which displays both scenes and rules too and you don’t need to search for the name.