As far as I know, at the moment, the ‘id’ of your sensor is hard-coupled to the unique hardware device id of your nodemcu. This makes it basically impossible to replace the nodemcu and keep going with the same measurement sequence.
I made a proposal to improve the mechanism, basically let sensor.community generate a unique id and putting that into the node configuration. This would make the esp8266 hardware id just another piece of metadata, not a critical identification number and thereby make it possible to replace the nodemcu. This new mechanism could also be combined with a (secret) bearer token to secure measurement data upload, so they can not be spoofed so easily. At the moment, anyone who knows your esp-id can send spoofed data on behalf of your sensor (although I have no indication yet that this is actually happening already).
I’ve outlined my proposal in
I have not seen any response from the firmware developers to this.
This would require some changes in the backend too, it’s not completely trivial to implement.