Demo Hubs for Installers

Summary

Several installers ask for hubs they can take with them, not hubs tied to one home. A demo hub would move with the installer: brought to a home for a demo or a trial, left there for a couple of days so the homeowner can live with it, then reset and reused at the next job.

Today every installation is bound to a specific homeowner and home — the platform assumes one hub, one property, one owner, permanently. Demo hubs break that assumption on purpose: the same physical hub serves many homes over time, with no leftover data from one home visible at the next. That decoupling is what makes this a complex feature, not just a new device mode.

The installer’s problem

• Demos need hardware on-site. Selling or proposing an installation means the homeowner should see and use a real Selora hub in their home — not a pitch
• Installs and trials span days. A hub left behind during a trial or a staged install can’t be retrieved and re-provisioned for the next customer
• Setup costs time and attention. Re-provisioning a hub by hand between homes is slow, error-prone, and — without a real reset — leaves the previous home’s configuration behind, which is a privacy problem as much as a usability one

What’s included

Demo hub lifecycle

• Dedicated demo hubs: hubs enrolled as demo units belong to the installer, not to a homeowner
• Bring it along: a demo hub is usable at any address the installer specifies — the install address is a setting, not the identity of the hub
• Leave it behind: a demo hub can stay at a home for days while the homeowner uses it; the installer keeps ownership and can reset it remotely whenever the demo ends

One-tap reset

• Reset button on the hub page: in the Connect hub page’s burger menu, installers get a “Reset hub” action
• Wipe and reinstall: the reset wipes the Home Assistant VM and reinstalls a fresh one — the hub comes back as if it had just left the factory, ready to be set up at the next home
• Reset is explicit and logged: the action is a deliberate, confirmable operation, and every reset is recorded in the hub’s audit trail so the installer knows when and where the last reset happened

Why it matters

• Faster demos and trials: the installer already owns working hardware — no loaner hardware logistics, no waiting for a unit to be provisioned
• Clean handoffs: a fresh reinstall between customers means no leftover automations, device lists, or settings from the previous home — a clean slate is a privacy guarantee, not a habit
• A sales asset: leaving a working hub in a home for a couple of days is the strongest sales pitch Selora has; this feature makes that workflow first-class instead of improvised
• Pipeline visibility: demo hubs in the field are potential customers — Selora can see which homes have a demo unit and follow up while the hardware is still there

The complexity

• Decoupling hub from homeowner. The platform currently ties an installation to a homeowner account; a demo hub must instead be owned by an installer account and temporarily bound to an address
• Temporary home bindings. A demo hub’s “home” is ephemeral — created, used for days, dissolved on reset — so the home/address model must support lifespans it doesn’t have today
• State hygiene on reset. Wiping the VM is the hard guarantee; we must also dissolve the temporary home binding, remove the homeowner’s temporary access, and clear any derived data (backups, monitoring history) so nothing of the previous home survives
• Ownership boundaries. While a demo hub sits in a homeowner’s house, the homeowner may use it — the access model has to allow the homeowner to interact with the hub without granting ownership or persistence, and revoke it cleanly at reset time

Out of scope (for now)

• Turning a production hub into a demo hub — demo units are dedicated, not convertible in place
• Homeowner self-service reset — resets are an installer action, not something a homeowner triggers
• Fleet-scale sharing between installers — a demo hub belongs to one installer, not a shared pool

Open questions

• How long can a demo last? Is there a maximum time a demo hub can remain bound to a home before it must be reset and reused?
• Homeowner account? Does the homeowner get a temporary account, or is the demo purely on the installer’s side (e.g. shared via a local portal on-site)?
• Backup data? A home bound for a few days still generates monitoring history and possibly backups — what’s the retention policy for that data after a reset?
• Hardware logistics: are demo hubs leased, owned, or part of an installation package, and who tracks their location in the field?