#Best practice for (planning for) successful replacement of broken device

1 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

fiery thistle
#

I've attempted to educate myself a bit on this topic but I remain confused. Consider this realistic scenario:

  1. I have a Lutron smart Dimmer with a couple of lamps plugged in.
  2. I have 5 scenes and automations that reference this smart dimmer.
  3. The smart dimmer dies and needs to be replaced

What best practices can I follow to make this as painless as possible? I was hoping there was a way to alias a device and reference the alias in automations and scenes, then one would only need to update the Alias configuration when replacing a device, but this doesn't seem possible. Or I'm failing to understand how it's handled in the HA world.

night carbon
#

If you avoid Device triggers/conditions/actions and use triggers/conditions/actions which reference the dimmer's entity ID, then all you would need to do is rename the entity ID for the new dimmer to match what the old one's was

fiery thistle
#

I want to make sure I'm understanding correctly.

  1. I just added a new Lutron dimmer via the Lutron app. During that process it prompted for an area, a device type, etc. I think the HA integration must use those details to concatenate a default entity ID light.basement_sitting_area_table_lamp
  2. I then created a simple Scene and instead of clicking on the Device list I clicked on the Entities list and found my new dimmer
  3. If I edit the YAML of the scene I see the light.basement_sitting_area_table_lamp in the entities
  4. If this dimmer crapped out some day I could theoretically add a new device to replace it, re-ID the old (dead) device and assign the same ID to the new device and everything would "just work"?

Do I have that correct?

#

As a test I just edited the Scene and used the Device menu instead of Entity to select my dimmer. The YAML for the scene still has the entity ID. The only diff is there is some metadata in the entity version.
I'm wondering what I'm achieving by using the entity over device? Or more broadly, what is the reason to ever use Entity list over the Device list?

image.png