Guides, explainers, and editorials for the modern smart home engineer.
Explainer
If your Home Assistant database is too large, the fix is to tune the recorder: lower purge_keep_days, exclude the noisy entities you never review, and...
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Explainer
If your Zigbee sensors drop off at random and you cannot find a pattern, the cause is very often a channel clash with your Wi-Fi....
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Explainer
A TTS announcement in Home Assistant is a tts.speak call that sends synthesized speech to any media player the hub controls — a smart speaker,...
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Explainer
You migrate Home Assistant to new hardware by restoring a full backup onto a fresh install and physically moving your radio coordinator sticks — not...
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Explainer
The difference between a dashboard you glance at and one you have to read is conditional cards. A conditional card shows a control or a...
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Explainer
Per-person notifications in Home Assistant mean addressing a human, not a phone. You build a script that takes a person entity, looks up that person’s...
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Explainer
A sump pump fails silently, and you usually find out by stepping into a flooded basement. A sump pump smart alert setup fixes that by...
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Explainer
A critical alert on iPhone is a notification that bypasses the ring/silent switch, Do Not Disturb, and any Focus mode, plays at a volume you...
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Explainer
Kiosk mode is what turns a cheap tablet into a proper wall panel: it locks the screen to a single Home Assistant dashboard, full-screen, with...
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Explainer
A Home Assistant blueprint is a reusable automation template with typed inputs: you write the logic once, then stamp out individual automations from it by...
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