Status of Hub Replacement Tool?

General Discussion
72

My 2 cents on migrating from the v1 to v2 (essentially hub replacement), it was painfully long. A few things I did to make it smooth:

  1. Added the new hub to the same account
  2. Have 2 phones running the ST app, on one open the old/dead hub and on the other open the newly added hub
  3. Open the IDE and click on the old/dead hub, for each device click an open in a new window and see list of connected smart apps
  4. Using the ST phone, one by one delete the device from the old hub and then add/pair it to the new hub
  5. Once that’s complete use the pages in step 3 to go an add all the SmartApps back for each device
  6. For “phone” presence device I went the old hub page in the IDE, copied the device DNI and created a new mobile phone presence device in the new hub and added the copied DNI to it and then deleted the device from the old hub. At first it shows as “present”, then you start the ST app on the respective mobile phones and it works perfectly.

One thing to note, if you’ve got a large multi floor house and you’ve got stuff all over, I would start by adding the PASSIVE devices FIRST to the new hub and starting with the FURTHER device. Reason being when a Z-Wave device in paired/included it sends a NIF (Node Information Frame) command to the hub to identify and include itself. NIF frames are NOT re-transmitted via active repeaters, hence this is why they say that new z-wave device should be very close to the hub when pairing it because the NIF needs to go straight to the hub. Hence if you don’t have any active devices in your network the chances of pairing a far away device with the hub increase dramatically. I was pretty much able to pair devices 3 floors apart using this strategy (because I REFUSE to remove all my z-wave device just to repair them). Finally I just had one device that was 4 floors apart and couldn’t pair, the good news is that the v2 hub runs on a battery, so I just took it up to the top and plugged it into the hub upstairs and completed the last pairing.

Finally then add the active repeater devices starting with the further away one (for the same reason as above) and work you way closer. After all this I did a Z-Wave Network Repair and so far I’m pretty impressed with the v2 hub. The mesh appears to be stronger, things are running faster, even custom DH’s seem to be responding better. So far so good.

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