I’ve been running HA for a while, and it’s been working well; I haven’t had to change much in a few months. That being said, it’s fun to tinker with it, and I’m curious to hear what kind of automations the rest of the community is using. What automations are you most proud of? What are your favorite? What kind of interesting automations have you written?
My personal favorite is an automation that displays the current “apparent” temperature on a Hue bulb. It takes an average of the temperature, humidity, and luminance around my property and uses the average to compute an “apparent” (feels like) temperature. Then it applies a cosine function to the apparent temperature (to approximate how people feel temperature change), uses the resulting value to calculate a level between blue and red in CIELAB (a perceptually uniform color space), converts the results to RGB, and sets the color value of the hue bulb. The result is a bulb that changes color so that the change in color (as perceived by the eye) mirrors how the temperature “feels” outside. Ultimately what that means is that we can look at a small lamp with the hue bulb and say “It feels cold outside; we should put on a coat.” It’s probably overkill, but it was a fun programming exercise. We’ve started saying things like “It’s really blue today, I don’t feel like going out.”
I’d really enjoy reading what kind of interesting automations everyone else has written.
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The hot water pipe to the kitchen is quite long. We have a pipe loop there with a pump. Back in the days we had an ordinary timer that let the pump run at the usual times when there is hot water demand to be expected.
I now use a Zigbee plug for the pump and added a button in the kitchen to start it manually. In addidion HA starts it in the morning and every time when somebody comes home. Another HA automation turns off the pump after 3 minutes and ensures that it does not start again for 30 minutes.
If the furnace starts pulling more than 4,000 Watts, I get a telegram message that the auxiliary heat is running instead of the heat pump.
I have a sensor in my kindergartner’s bag that lets me know when he gets to school and when he leaves school, also via telegram message.
If someone loiters around my driveway for more than 30 seconds, I get a telegram message with an image.
I haven’t said it back up since I moved but I used to have one that used a combo sensor my washer and dryer doors. If the sensor moved enough for long enough it set a flag that the unit was running. If it want from running to not running for a long enough period of time, and the contact sensor wasn’t tripped, I would receive alerts every 30 minutes or so that the clothes were done and still in the washer/dryer.
Even something as simple as water sensors under the sink if saved my ass. Cabinetry these days is made out of fiberboard and if it stays wet for more than a couple of hours it does horrible things.
I have a motion sensor in the bedroom that turns the light on when you enter it (or leave it) and turns it off after some time once there is no motion detected anymore. But there is also a button right next to the door which disables the automation for 10 minutes for entering the bedroom at night when our youngest is already sleeping in the room.
Simple but very useful and even my wife likes it alot.
I have a motion sensor that turns on the bathroom light when you enter, then turns it off after no motion is detected for 5 minutes. Works great except for those long sessions on the toilet; nobody likes to poop in the dark. Now I have a door sensor on the bathroom so when no motion is detected, it turns off the lights after 5 minutes unless the door is closed, then it’s 30 minutes. Much better than having to wave your arms around every 5 minutes when you’re trying to take care of business.
My favorite is turning on the bedroom lights when my alarm goes off :)
HTML scrape of CUPS web server to see if there’s a print job waiting, turn on tasmota plug for laserprinter, then turn off in 5 minutes to save power.
It’s an old LJ4000 so it’s idle power is pretty high.
https://youtu.be/OIkZWF5uGxk?si=FgGlXXJCn3q6540A
My goto selling point for Home Assistant is that I haven’t touched the outdoors light switch in 8 years.
I have a binary sensor that turns on when I’m away from home for 30 minutes and off when I’m home for 5 minutes. When I open the door and the sensor is on, music starts playing and the living room lights turn on. Love it.
Sunset and sunrise automations. Lights on and off, vacuum run times - all adapted to presence.
Made the litter-robot auto-repair when it enters trouble states. Better history of all elements controlled.
I use a lot of sunset/sunrise automations, but one of my favorite is for the lights on the main floor of the house. They turn on with a motion/presence sensor when someone enters the room, but the intensity of the light and the color of the light are controlled by the sunrise/sunset times. During the day, they turn on at 100% brightness and a cool white; starting 1 hour before sunset and 1 hour before sunrise, they scale between 100%/cool white and 60%/warm white. You don’t notice it unless you’re really paying attention, but it really helps the house feel a lot more “cozy.”
I’m almost embarrassed to admit, I found an online image of the colors of the sky through the day, pasted it into excel, and then capture 160+ rgb values for the sunset. It was a tedious process, but no math got it right.
I set all those values (and a warmer and cooler set) in the script and then pass in the desired duration. Most nights we have a 45 minute sunset play out across 6 total lights. Three sets of values, so the bulbs don’t match.
Starts as soft white ending in the darkest twilight blue my bulbs can provide. We remark on it regularly and I think it’s helped ease us into the right frame of mind for sleep.
I run the same values in reverse for sunrise.
Clearly, its my favorite one.
I have all the TV inputs automated via voice commands. Eg. If you say “let’s watch plex”, tv turns on if off, input switches, HDMI switch changes, and Plex launches on the shield.
