6 Simple Yet Effective Smart Home Automation Ideas!

Thanks for the ideas! Do you have a step-by-step tutorial about the first atumation (the robot vacuum one)? I am struggling with it, especially with the actionable notification...

I've slowly been making my way through your video's randomly it seems. I have to say they are great. I have a couple of automations you might find interesting. the first similar to your shower uses a zooz temperature/humidity/light/motion sensor to determine when the exhaust fan should be turned on. Right now, I simply compare it's humidity against a similar sensor in the bedroom to determine if the humidity is over 10 % higher. if it is, it turns on the exhaust fan and turns it back off if it's within 5% of the sensor in the bedroom. That way it takes into account the wild swings in humidity we get around here by comparing it against a baseline that should be similar to the humidity for the rest of the house.
I also have the same sensors in each room, controlling ceiling fans. I setup helper slider controls for each room that act as a type of thermostat. When the temperature sensor reports it being warmer than the high slider, it turns on the ceiling fan. When it's below the low slider, it turns off the ceiling fan. This way it's customizable for each room of the house. I need to build a custom card around this but I haven't gotten to it yet. I just cut and paste the yaml.
The next and I have to say one of my favorites, is when the light has been turned on in the toilet for over 5 minutes, the exhaust fan it turned on ( because if you have been in there over 5 minutes, you are making a stink and need the fan). Then 5 minutes after the light has been turned out, the fan is turned off. Hopefully by then the stink has dissipated.
Finally I run a home based mobile business. Our supplies are stored at my house and from time to time if we have to bring work home we use my garage as a shop. I really don't need to have the security cameras in my garage recording my employees working all day, chewing up my disk space. I see anything of value they take out of the shop on my outdoor cameras. So espresense detects their keyfob, it turns off the recordings in the garage but leaves them on everywhere else. When they don't register for over a couple of minutes, then the recordings start back up.
Right now I do all of these automations through appdaemon. My past life was as a programmer so this was easier to pickup than yaml and when I started NodeRed didn't exist. I can see the attraction of NodeRed, it reminds me of PLC ladder logic.
Thanks again for all the videos. You have given me several new ideas to spend money on. LOL

Good overview, thanks. You likely said vacation because you said zee wave instead of the correct zed wave.

Honestly, one of the reasons I got into automation was because of things like this. Hell, my first ever automation was just to turn the lights on when it got dark out, cause it would just sit in the dark for hours on end before I realized. People talk about automations like this making us lazy but, the ability to augment my life and help me do things, especially things i would otherwise frequently forget, has been one of the best things for my quality of life

Thanks Lewis,, a few things there were an 'oh wow' moment. Love your stuff x.

In the fifth automation you have "Confirm number of active people is above 0". What is that, and how to do it??

A Bit of a noob question here. But how have you set up your automation to check when no-one has been home for the last 24 hours?

So when there is vacuuming is an ideal time to rob your home…😅

Love you video, great jobb,. I am pretty newe to HA, esp, node-red all that. in this automation you for the vaccum you have a "when everyone is leaves home " I guess that is somthing you have created. Cant you make a video about that like smart thing. now about this. i alls saw a other video, when you talk about enery and got a entit for the house. how to make them, and why you have them,

Regard

cool, wasn't aware of the presence automation! I tried setting this up for myself in NodeRed, and got it working (sort of)... but this may suit my needs as well!

I appreciate that these are some good home automation ideas, but I just gotta say that none of them are actually simple at all

Hi, tell me how to building a hysteresis thermostat in HA?

So we can sit outside while you're out, wait to hear the vacuum start, then break in safe in the knowledge the alarm is off? 😉

Note about 3rd automation
1) It does not send room names, and naming sensors with room name in it just clutters the UI
2) If sensor actually dies, battery percentage shows as unavailable rather then a number, and this blueprint just ignores it (and as you know sensors can die with battery well above 10%)

Better to do it from custom templates to include what I said here also

Thanks for the video =)

For those that use home assistant as your alarm you can have the vacuum automation ignore motion sensors. That way alarm is still armed and only door sensor will trip.

Hi, thanks for showing this configurations you use with Home Assistant. I would love to have that second idea of yours is it somewhere to pickup and use?

One thing I wonder about the 'precense simulator' is turning on lights when the curtains/blinds are open, I have a similar custom rolled automation where I turn on/off things like hallway lights at random intervals but leave out anything that faces the street.

I suppose the solution to that would be to buy a curtain driver but...money :D

Great ideas! I’m in the rabbit hole right now

So weird, we also have a Deebot robot vacuum we oddly call Rupert.

I really appreciate how you have the sponsor timer. I'm not often in the market for the sponsored item so it's nice to be able to quickly find the end.

A useful automation that paid off this winter it was my smart thermostat. I have retrofitted my old thermostat using a shelly 1 relay so I can trigger the hot water valve on and off since I have radiators and there is a central heating system for all the apartments in my building. Then I used the smart PID integration found in HACS to control the temperature with a 0.1°C accuracy. Then with the help of an automation I set the temperature accordingly. 18°C when no one is at home, 19 for sleeping, 20.5 constant during the day when we are at home. My bill went up to 1/3 of that of the previous year and also had the smaller amount of hot water used in the entire building

I'd like to do the humidity sensor but have some issues to solve. First, the switch is in a double gang dual switches (so 2x2). And I will want manual control for when you are in there for other reasons. So replacing the switch will be a challenge. I could add a shelly into the fan, but then I'd need to leave the switch on which requires retraining.

How does your dog deal with the robot vacuum? We have ours run overnight so the dogs aren't bothered (they're in the bedrooom)

Do i need multiple HA on a raspberry pi with a zigbee dongle for other zigbee devices where my main raspberry cant reach?

One of the cool things I've started doing with the local calendar is automating my 'Guest Mode'. I've got a bunch of automations that I don't want to run or wnat to run differently if we've got people staying over. I've got an input toggle helper that lets me turn guest mode on and off which is used as a condition in the automations. Originally, I was manually just triggering this when we had guests, but with the local calendar, I now just create an event for the duration we'll have people staying. Then an automation that flips the helper when the event starts and turns it off when they leave.

Great ideas. But . . . how often does that Deebot vacuum get stuck? I have had 2 of them, the same model as yours, and my house is not cluttered, but the robot gets stuck in the stupidest places. For example, it rams into the fireplace hearth in broad daylight and no matter how many times I move it, it goes right back and continues ramming. The percentage of times it completes a run without my intervention is very low. And it loves to re-arrange lightweight furniture. It's a persistent and powerful little bugger when it goes into blind ramming mode - which is often.

That battery blueprint is awesome! Been looking for a way to do that for a while.
Only thing is, when I test run, it seems to notify even if there are no low batteries - will this occur every day?

I really like your upcoming events on the 27th and 28th of february ;-)

I named my robot hoover Mr Dalek. He can’t do stairs 😂

First

I wanted to do the humidity sensor one, but for some reason the aqara temperature and humidity sensors I have don't play nicely with my zigbee network. I think it's because there is something they don't like about being routed through the sonoff zbminis I have. Or maybe it's my sonoff zigbee usb 3.0 adapter MAYBE a simple firmware update would fix everything, but I'd rather not risk killing my whole zigbee network on a firmware upgrade....

yes i like these videos, gets me think about my HA and improve on things. Keep it up! thanks

Please make your video louder. They are way too quiet to compare with others channel. Otherwise, perfect channel !

I should definitely think of an automation like your adguard automation. Thanks for the idea 👍🏼

I’ve got a question: Is there a way to use the auto-entities card with the custom light card? Or would I need to setup a light view like yours manually?

I will use the batteries automation!

I need number one. But my vacuum is a joke. Had it fixed 3 times. Same vacuum robot as yours.

Never bothered with time or exit for the bathroom one, if the humidity is still above 65% it won't hurt to leave it running forever, a bit of airflow will help limit mold. A fan only uses a few watts usually so even if it ran through the night it shouldn't make a real difference to the electric bill.

I also let it trigger regardless of the shower, again if humidity is high, regardless of reason, a bit of airflow won't hurt

With the latest delay of HA's Yellow controller (now end of August for us Aug '22 buyers), what kind of min-PC (like an Intel NUC) would you recommend to host HA? Or would you recommend something else? I've got a nice new house with a bunch of smart devices installed but also a bunch of individual product-specific apps to control them. I was hoping to use HA to bring them all together, but with Yellow out of the picture for the near term, I need something I can install sooner.

Nice! Almost have a version of my own on all the 6 automations but will tweak a few with your twist.
The presence simulation I also trigger when I turn the vacation alarm on. I use s lot of actionable notification on the phone. Usually they also is to turn of a started automation. One I have is that I set an event on Google calendar that starts my heater in the car everyday if the temperature is below 4 degree then I can turn that off if I'm not going to work.

Good find on the Presence Simulation Lewis!

I was doing something far less sophisticated with my automation schedules and random offsets in Node-RED,, but I like this approach better and will give it a try. Installing via HACS as I type.

My favorite automation is definitely my music button. One press and it plays music depending on the time of day. If it is late it would play a loft mix, and earlier in the day it would play something more upbeat. Finally when I press the button on Friday it plays my happy mix and sets my lights to a fun effect.

For the extraction fan I personnaly simply use the general_hygrostat, works really well and takes into account low and high threshold, minimum duration, etc.

1. I bet "vacation" comes from having some wonderful American influences. 2. Don't make Sarah suffer more, she deals with enough having to be married to you. 😁

If I may make a recommendation for your shower one: It works, but I have found a better way. Use the humidity sensor to set up a derivative helper. That helper tells you how fast or how slowly the humidity is rising/falling. When it rises above x% per minute, turn on (turns on way quicker that waiting for set percentage, and if its just a humid day it won't accidentally trigger), and then turn it off when the derivative helper has been between -1 and 1 for 5 minutes so that when the humidity has stabilized it turns off. I've found it to be better personally.

Thank you.