homeassistant

Hi there!

My home assistant setup is super simple: pre-configured Home Assistant Green box, Zigbee dongle and some assorted Zigbee devices scattered around my home. I have the Home Assistant app on my phone to see the Dashboard while I’m at home, but since I never configured the box to be accessible from outside of my network, I obviously can’t see the Dashboard if I’m not at home. Very basic stuff so far.

One automation for each battery was getting crazy. A temperature sensor in most rooms, motion detectors and a handful of door/window sensors. This blueprint creates an automation that manages all batteries dynamically. Really is amazing.

After a power outage this weekend, when HASS came back up I lost all automations related to my Sonoff Orb 4-Way smart switch, and one of my GE 800 Z-Wave switches no longer responds, though it still works manually pressing the switch.

I finally found out you can use the Android Debug Bridge integration to play specific YouTube videos on Smarttube (adfree youtube app)!

I was having zigbee device dropping issues and I’ve been looking at the zbt-2. I was hesitating due to the price. I went to take another search this evening and there’s one listed at a huge discount. I’m not going to post the link here as I’m unsure of the rules, but it’s easy to find on Amazon.ca.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but…

I just got an Airthings Radon monitor, and the integration with HA went smoothly. As a starting dashboard I have a simple card displaying sensor values.

Scenario: I have an automation called John’s AC. John’s AC has four separate triggers. Max, minimum lower temperature, lower temperature, upper temperature, and max upper temperature. If the room temperature is below max lower temperature or lower temperature and it warms up to either of those two triggers, the automation gets triggered and creates a log event.

I’m thinking about getting started using Docker and an older Raspberry Pi. I’m already hosting a grafana service on it, so It can’t be fully dedicated to ha. So curious what everyone is using.

I would like to turn on mood lighting automatically when I’m taking a shower, what’s the best way to detect that?

Like the title says. Anyone using Claude? How is it working for you?

I’m running my own HA locally, in my house, but I would like to be able to access it also when I’m not home. So I’ve put it on my Zerotier One VPN, which works fine. Except for two things:

Im falling down a hole here. Long story still long, but it started when got a Tuya remote and trying to integrate it. Im currently using the plain old Zigbee Home Automation (ZHA). The new remote got recognized fine, I could see button presses in events but I didnt know hot to use those to trigger events (nothing shows up when try to create an automation).

Hi everyone. I recently started my Home Assistant journey by replacing Google Calendar and Keep Notes with Home Assistant. A couple of light bulbs burnt out and I want to replace them with bulbs that I can use exclusivity on Home Assistant and bypass the manufacturers app entirely. What brand should I look for?

Hey all Just getting started on some smart home stuff - I’m looking to get some strip lighting and there is a lot of stuff out there and honestly I’m not sure what I should get. Ideally it would be RGB but I’m OK with white/warm light.

Looking for ZigBee or 433MHz soil sensors!

Hi everyone

So I’ve seen all kinds of dashboards depicting all sorts of informations and functions to control ones home and I was wondering, what things you have depicted on yours which turned out to be really useful esp. for other family members. I would like to keep mine as small and simple as possible. So far I have planned to show the following:

I mostly understand the dilemma, but I want to see if someone has better success with their AI assistant. I use the Ollama integration and set up a conversation model. However, the default Home Assistant AI knows to use the home forecast entity whenever I ask about the weather. Whether I also set up an AI task model, toggle “control Home Assistant” on or off, or toggle “perform local commands” on or off - the Ollama models do not reference the home forecast the way the default Home Assistant can. I thought maybe keeping default commands on would enable this ability while answering all other queries with the Ollama LLM. I just want a smarter AI. Any suggestions?

Soo, someone was backing up their @homeassistant on its own local disk, instead of something outside the VM which runs HA 🤦‍♂️

Little did I know when I found a HomeKit lightbulb in the clearance bin at my grocery store for $3 what it would lead to. Here I am, though, adding to and re-jiggering my smart home set up. It’s nothing earth-shattering, but it was fun, and I thought I’d share what I found out in case it’s news to other folks. It started when I bought a handful of new Sonoff devices…

Maybe not the correct place but I know a lot of folks use NFC tags to trigger automation.

I have a few sneaky tiptoeing but loveable miscreants as part of my family and I would like to keep them out of my office. I’m sure some of you can relate.

IDK how else to describe it.

Hi All,

Hello all,

Local integration, no cloud preferred.

As the title says, I’m having one hell of a time getting HAOS to see my Conbee II.

I am fairly new to home automation and I am looking to add a few physical wall switches to devices that don’t have a specific wall switch of their own. I have a couple rooms where I want to put a light on a smart bulb/plug/relay but want to be able to turn the light on/off via a physical interaction at the door, like a normal light switch. The only solution I see right now is to expand the hole for the existing light (ceiling fan actually) switch, add another smart switch that doesn’t actually have a load, and then set it up so if that switch is turned “on/off” then I have a automation that triggers the smart relay. But that seems like gross overkill. I honestly don’t care about cutting holes or wiring stuff up, but somehow paying full price for a smart switch and then using it as nothing more than an alternative user interface for yet another smart device seems really wrong. Currently I have several kaso/tapo switches installed and have been looking at some smart relays/plugs/bulbs to turn on a lamp, or trigger the light on the fan separately from the fan itself.

If you’re using the Home Assistant voice assistant mechanism (not Alexa/Google/etc.) how’s it working for you?

Next month the kitchen is getting remodeled and I volunteered to provide outlets and light switches for the contractors. I need like 13 of each.

A little question for the HA and DIY crossroad. Has anyone here made your own sensors/devices with arduino, pi or some other microcontroller/sbc to interact with HA? I have some spare parts around and I’m thinking in something simple, like an air quality, maybe a little weather station or something to tell me if the garage door is opened or close, something simple, yet usable. I had a look on instructables, but I wished for something that would integrate with my first HA experience. Any thoughts?

The washing machine tells me how long it’s going to take when I start it, but it’s often wrong and takes longer. I’ve been descending into the basement countless times, usually from the first floor, only to notice it’s not done yet.

Hey gang, I’ve got a chunk of free time lately, and I’ve been working on some of the backlog issues I’ve had with my HA instance. The one that is giving me trouble right now is my thermostat - I use Honeywell total connect (or whatever its called), and it works just fine when using the normal thermostat card or controls. However, I want it to be warmer in the day, and colder at night. So I had been using a scheduler entity from the HACS store. It always used to work, but lately I’ve been getting out of bed and realizing the temp is still set to the nighttime temp.

I have a few old automations that are designed to unlock my front door, or open my garage door, depending on how I leave. If I ride my bike or car, it opens my garage, if I leave via front door, it opens the front door. Pretty simple. Except!!! I did this in pieces, so it’s 2 separate automations. One detects my phone entering the “home zone”, the other detects an event firing (iOS triggered the event via ‘shortcuts’)

I recently noticed, that the Home Assistant app on F-Droid has been stuck on 2025.11.4 since, well, November 2025.

Hello everyone, and good evening. I got to old motorola phones (one fusion and a g8) and I’m gonna install ip webcam to put them to some use. Is there any other way I can make use of them with HA? Can I use their sensors for anything else?

I was reading the changelog for the Home Assistant SLZB Add-on and saw they added support for the SLZB Ultima. I looked it up on Aliexpress out of curiosity, expecting it to be their most expensive offering since it has 4 antennas for Z-Wave, Zigbee, Thread, and 4G/LTE. Also RGB (eyeroll). But its price is similar to other SLZB offerings. I’m suspicious since it seems too good to be true. Is the price low because there was no support previously or are there problems with the device?

As many of you probably know, Google does not allow you to change the buttons of their chromecast remote. We don’t use Netflix at all, but we use Jellyfin. I just though of it and tested it, but Home assistant allows you to track the chromecast and functionality replace one app with another. Making the button now open the jellyfin app

Severity 9.1 - Authenticated user container escape.

I’m thinking about getting a larger television, as what I have is a bit too small for the living room. I have an inexpensive soundbar that mostly works, but doesn’t always turn on with CEC, and occasionally stops passing the video signal through and needs to be power-cycled.

What are people hooking up to their HAVpe’s for good sounding speakers? Obviously Big brands like Bose kill it, but any cheap alternatives with good sound for whole house audio?

Any experiences with measuring the water level in a well? My well is less than 5 Meters deep and 20 Meters from the house (no electricity available (yet, but who knows)

I never asked for “Lights” or “Security” and many other boards in my sidebar. Even worse, they seem to be getting more. Home Assistant used to feel clean to me, now I get Facebook vibes and a touch of devs way overstepping.

I thought I’d share this tip, since I just found it a few weeks ago, and I thought maybe newer people might have overlooked the value of it. You can create a custom macro template for things that you use more than once.

I keep having my home assistant freese when I try and activate HAV, been debugging it but didn’t found anything yet to solve it.

Can anyone help with pointers for automatable garage heaters? So far my searches aren’t finding anything. My requirements are: - remotely preheat when I want to work out - alert if it’s left on, or automatically turn off

Hello Plex / Home Assistant community!

I’m looking for a smart lock for my house and I’ve seen these at a pretty interesting price on Aliexpress (https://a.aliexpress.com/_mMbQRZx), it says that it can be controlled with the tuya app and I have some old plugs integrated from that app, but I also have a lamp that connects to that app but not to the home assistant. Does anyone know if I will have problems integrating this lock into my system? Does anyone have this model or similar?

I have a button that triggers a script for bedtime to turn off all lights, and, if pressed again, checks to see if all lights are off and if so, turns a few (like the bathroom light) on.

I’m attempting to add a no-name chinese solar wifi soil sensor to my HA server and have a couple questions. I was able to pair the device to the Smart Life app, add the Tuya integration to HA, link my Smart Life account to the HA integration, and recognize the device from that integration.

So I moved a few months ago, and only just now had time between work and school to set up my smart home again. Which turned out to be a sort-of blessing, since HA did some updates and the one for sensor and binary sensor templates dramatically screwed me as I template a lot. It also gave me the opportunity to upgrade my Yellow’s Pi module, and I found (though haven’t installed) an internal z-wave module for it, which I’ll do when I’m off for Christmas and New Year.

A while back I ditched Windows for Linux desktop (long time Linux user, just not desktop) because I’ve learned to hate Microsoft.

So, I have an automation that checks the month and applies a scene accordingly. I could never get it to work quite right though. Every time it was supposed to trigger a specific scene, it would just default to a base scene. I ran it through DDG AI and it found a single line that was causing the “choose” to fail and defaulted to the default scene. Not a fan of LLMs/AI but this actually helped.

I still have trouble understanding how to add an MQTT device without YAML. It seems there’s an elaborate GUI flow made to deal with this, so why is this so complicated?

I’m completely out of the smart lights loop and I’m looking for light bulbs that allow me to set brightness, color temperature and possibly the color in general using HA.

TL;DR: How do I make the thermostat send a ‘heat’ request to the boiler without making the boiler use way too much gas?

Wife gave me a heads up that she expects we’ll get a Roomba from her parents for Christmas - most likely a Roomba Max 505 or 705 (or the Costco variations on those).

If I were to install window motion sensors, glass break sensors, door sensors, and cameras, I’ve basically got my own home security system. But how would you go about mimicking the remote monitoring functions that a company such as ADT or SimpliSafe would do?

I see a lot of HA users using the Ring Keypad to arm/disarm their alarm over Z-Wave. I’m suspicious of Amazon, probably overly so. I just tore out a Ring doorbell. Having said that, if this thing can work entirely free of cloud dependencies, it may still work for me.

TLDR: I learned the hard way that, at some point, my nightly backups were switched to being encrypted. As far as I can tell, it seems like it was part of an update and not a lot of users noticed it. Thankfully (and concerningly?), the key is stored in plain text if you can recover data from your SD card.

I’ve been running Home Assistant for a while and have wifi, zwave and zigbee networks. My zigbee is on a ZBT-1. I was happy until this week.

Go back up your HA installation right now.

I just made the switch to a beefier host and I’m trying to figure out what to do with the green I have now that I’m not using.

As the title says, I’m looking for a plug that can measure power consumption, but does not even have a relay to power it on or off. I want it always to be on. The reason is that I’m tired of my smart plugs randomly turning off for no reason, even after I’ve updated them to the latest firmware version. Heck, I even have an automation in Home Assistant that turns them on again when it happens. I don’t even know if what I’m looking for does even exist. I’ve been looking around and haven’t found anything like it. If any of you fine folks know, please shout!

I have an outlet in my bathroom that’s above and to the left of my sink and I’m wondering if it would be safe enough to use some of those third reality plugs in it.

Should I put my smart plugs into the consumption section or the individual devices section on the energy dashboard?

I have been running HA on a Pi3b for a few years. It’s been a bit flakey the last few months so I’m looking to upgrade to a Pi5. After the replacement I expect to add more items and maybe phase out the Insteon for more Z-Wave.

I have an Inovelli White Series Matter+Thread light switch. It has a custom button called Config that you can use for automations. Config is listed under Events in Device Info. I’ve noticed some unexpected behavior whenever I run sudo docker compose restart.

I have my old Surface Pro 4 I want to use as a google home like front end and eventually for voice control. I have CachyOS/Arch installed on it, but all the front ends I found seem to require ubuntu/debian and are made exclusively for raspberry pi touch screens.