Any notion of house modes/states in Home Assistant?

Hi,

I’m pretty new to home assistant and am getting started with some basic automations. I was wondering if there is any notion of a house “mode” in Home Assistant that I can make use of? I’m basically thinking of a global state variable that can be referenced in automations or that can trigger actions when its state changes.

For example I’d like to set up a “vacation” mode. Not only would I trigger some actions when I enter vacation mode (e.g., turn off lights and adjust thermostats), but I would also like to suspend some daily automations (e.g., don’t automatically open the curtains in the morning) and change some notification behaviors (e.g., send me an urgent notification if motion is detected in the house). This would presumably be a boolean value… or I could imagine a more-sophisticated implementation with an enumerated 3-value state (“home”, “away”, “vacation”). I could imagine other modes for “sleeping” or “watching TV”.

Based on my understanding, this differs from “scenes” in that it’s not only about changing states of a bunch of devices when you enter a mode, but it also should affect the behavior of devices and scripts/automations while you’re in the mode.

Is there any easy/standard way to do this?

Thanks!

Please have a search through the many forum posts on this and see if they may help you.

In short there’s no one RIGHT way, but the tools are all there depending on your preference.

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Great! Thanks for the links!