Smart home automation ideas, routines, and advanced setups
Explainer
If you are weighing Home Assistant scenes vs scripts vs automations, here is the one-line mental model I run by: a scene is a saved...
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Helpers are the variables and memory of your Home Assistant setup. On their own, automations are stateless: they fire, do a thing, and forget. A...
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The right way to get low-battery warnings in Home Assistant is one automation that watches every battery in the house at once. A template loops...
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Every good Home Assistant dashboard is built on top of tidy entities, and every messy one is built on top of chaos. Before you place...
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A Home Assistant template sensor is a brand-new entity you build from existing state using a Jinja template. In my setup the headline win is...
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Reliable arrive and leave notifications in Home Assistant come from combining several presence signals, not from “phone joined the Wi-Fi.” Layer GPS zone transitions, a...
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A phone dashboard has a different job from a wall tablet, and the mistake almost everyone makes is trying to use one layout for both....
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A floorplan dashboard is the most intuitive control layout there is: instead of hunting through a list of entities, you look at a map of...
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You cut Home Assistant notification spam with three techniques layered together: debounce collapses a burst of state changes into one alert, throttle enforces a minimum...
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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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