I haven’t had to integrate a new HA platform into my setup before, hopefully I’ll get a chance to do that soon 
. I have my own thoughts, but am curious to hear any advice or stories from others who have gone on that journey before, not just those who have beta tested a new system, but also those who have made that transition in a production setup.
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I haven’t had to migrate to a system before either, so I’m genuinely curious about other responses.
But I think personally, as I only have a relatively small number of devices, I recon I will pick a weekend and ‘rip the band aid off’ and start over!
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I’m sure there are bigger setups than mine but it does feel like major surgery when considering everything I have setup over the last 3-4 years. I’ll be taking things slowly, but trying to cover a broad enough list of devices and integrations to feel comfortable.
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I have done it twice.
- Slowly
- Methodically, I looked at my mesh and went 1 logical set of interconnected automations at a time. Bathroom, then bedroom, then living room, then … until all I had left were the whole house automations to do at the end.
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I have done it a few times with 100+ devices.
I don’t like slow migration so I pick a slow week and go hard at it and iron out any issue the week after.
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It depends on if you’re all in or you want to start from scratch. But, don’t over think this. Took me about 5 minutes. OK 10. Moving the rules took a bit of time. Just the ones outside of Node-RED.
@RRodman did it take you very long?
[EDIT]
But, it does depend on the integrations as well. ZB & ZW were easy.
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If this is as simple as you say I am super excited. I fear the Z-Wave process of going throughout the house, excluding, and then pairing, failing to pair, then moving closer, failing to pair, then moving closer with an extension cord, then it pairs, but when I return to the final destination, it now doesn’t communicate. 
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I’m gonna be honest here. I’ve moved things a few times. During development, I’ve sent the HAF acceptance factor to the outer limits and back. My last install was a fresh install of all devices. I knew how I wanted to do it. I knew that I wanted to pair powered mains first with repeaters. So, I can share my experience with you now. I preferred the fresh install over the “move”. Why? What did I learn? I’ll tell you.
I can’t reiterate how easy things were to pair. I know that a lot of you are aware of the research I did on Z-Wave when the locks were the main point of contention in HE, so you know I don’t take that lightly. I DO have and will ALWAYS have Z-Wave repeaters. Aeotec 6’s with beaming paired secure. They make all the difference. I paired my Z-Wave locks in place. All three of them. One of them being a Schlage BE468. They pair a bit differently, and If I forget to do a write up on it, ask me because you’ll need a programming code that stumped me for a bit until Google produced some answers. I did have to bring my older GoControl Z-Wave contact sensors to the controller to pair, but when I placed them, they remained fast as lightening and didn’t complain one bit. Even with the current firmware woes, it still runs amazingly well. I had no issues with pairing and I didn’t fight with any of my devices. Well, after I remembered how to get them into pairing mode. (Rookie mistake)
For Zigbee, I set the pairing time out to something like 500 seconds and started moving through my devices where they were placed. Reset/pair/name next. I had all of my Zigbee devices paired within an hour or so. I don’t remember having any pairing woes and things pair the minute they power in most cases. It was easy and stress free.
I, personally, can’t wait for the buzz when you receive your COREs and start pairing a few devices to “Test”. Or … maybe you’ll hate it. 
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One thing to remember with zwave locks is to make sure you have a fresh set of batteries installed when excluding and re-adding it back. That tripped me up recently.
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What is your opinion on Iris 3210-L/L2’s as z-wave repeaters?
I sold mine. I moved to INNR zigbee plugs. The Iris ones worked fine, but they felt unstable and I have all mains powered zwave repeaters. I never paired the Z-Wave side of things. I did once on HE and they tossed up my mesh. I like the Iris motions. The plugs, not so much.
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Sorry just now seeing the tag 
It took me about 90 seconds to make the switchover, but I’m a bit of an edge case in that regard since my home was being run off a debian VM. I simply moved my zigbee stick over to core, and uploaded my config files for zigbee2mqtt HA NR etc, tweaked a setting or two for core and I was back up and running like nothing ever changed. Smooth as butter.
Honestly the most complex/timely part of my transition was breaking my Frigate/Deepstack/DoubleTake (Realtime NVR and AI detection with triggers for automation) setup out onto its own system because that is beyond the intended scope of CORE 1.0
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I started recreating and tweaking all the automations from HE into Node-Red, which I believe is the most time-consuming part since I never used NR before (actually I lie, I use it to log events from HE into an InfluxDB instance that sits on my NAS).
Right now I have things setup to simulate the actions to a log so I can check everything is working.
The next step would be to move the devices over which should not take long after repairing is done.
The last step would be to recreate a dashboard in NR, HA or CORE once that’s available.
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I found it to be too crude for my taste.
I’m trying to talk @jpage4500 into adding CORE support to his awesome Android dashboard. It wouldn’t hurt to let him know if you want it too.
We will work with him if he wants to create it. He just needs to pm me.
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