On Moving My Home Automations

In the last year, I became a homeowner for the first time, moving out of the house I had been renting.

As a DIY home automation enthusiast, that means I had to figure out how to transfer my home automation setup to my new abode as painlessly as possible, among other complexities of buying a house and then moving into it.

My home automation setup is powered by Home Assistant running on a virtual machine on my home server — aka a refurbished Dell Optiplex that I keep in my superb “network closet”:

My so-called ”smart home” consists of a lot of Z-Wave devices, a few Zigbee devices and some Wi-Fi devices as well. Most of the devices I use are comprised in the following categories:

• Smart light switches and buttons
• Smart bulbs
• Smart plugs
• Door sensors
• Temperature / humidity sensors

The Problem

Of course, all my switches, plugs and lightbulbs could not care less in what house they are physically present. After all, making a Z-Wave, Zigbee or Wi-Fi network functional again in a new location is merely a matter of plugging everything again — and maybe recomputing the Mesh nodes in the case of Z-Wave and Zigbee.

However, that would only be a practical fact in a world where all houses were identical — cue to that all-squid neighborhood from SpongeBob:

Anyway, my new house obviously does not have the same layout as my old one. It does not have the same lights of the same types in the same locations, nor does it inspire the same needs for automations — or the same solutions. For example, multiple rooms at the old house lacked light fixtures, and were therefore lit by plugged-in lamps instead, which is less the case at the new house. Which is to say that moving a smart home system involves redoing most automations and switching things around. A smart device named Bedroom lamp plug in one house might very well become Living room rotating disco ball in a new one.

Possible Solutions

I saw two possible ways I could proceed with moving my setup:

Solution 1: Restart From Scratch

That means reinstalling Home Assistant and reconfiguring everything from a blank canvas.

Pros

• Clean state, no risk of staying stuck with relics from the old house in the configuration.
• No need to keep track of what function every smart device used to have.

Cons

• Losing all configurations and automations, even ones that are still relevant after moving.
• Re-adding every device to a new install might be a hassle.

Solution 2: Rename Devices As You Go

That means keeping the existing configurations, and renaming smart devices as new needs arise in the new house. Naturally, the pros and cons are basically flipped from solution 1:

Pros

• Avoids having to reconfigure everything, as some configurations and automations might still be relevant.
• Avoids the possible hassle of re-adding every device to a new install.

Cons

• Possibility of staying stuck with relics from the old house in the configuration.
• Requires a way to keep track of what function every smart device used to have.

How I Did It

I decided to go with solution 2, as I considered its cons to be the lesser evil of the two. Before shutting down the server at the old house, I turned off all my automations, and then I took down all my smart devices before labeling them with masking tape and carefully packaging them into a box. The labels were to allow me to know how each device was referred to in Home Assistant.

Then, in the new house, every time I set a device up again, I use the label to identify its current entity, which I then rename according to its new function. To this day, I still have many devices in that box, as I progressively rebuild my smart home over time. This means I currently have a lot of “ghost” entities in Home Assistant, but it does not really bother me.

Smart Home Choices for Ease of Moving

One choice I made in the past allowed the moving process to be way easier than it could have been: my setup relies mostly on smart devices that do not need to be installed in a “permanent” manner. Currently, all my smart switches are battery-powered, they are either stick-to-the-wall buttons that trigger automations to toggle other smart devices, or motorized light switches that sit on top of the “dumb” switches. In the future, I might make different choices now that I own my house and plan to stay there for decades. However, while I was renting for a few years, that was definitely the smarter choice.