So I have always wondered, why is there no ability to make like sub areas.
With HA being so powerful I thought surely there must be a way to have an overall grouping for things inside the house and outside the house. Like the ability to call for all outside lights to turn on or hey whats the temp outside, ignoring the usually inaccurate weather forecast, and it polling the sensors I have outside the walls of my home.
This makes more sense now with the push for the voice assistant hardware and structure of those commands. When speaking in a given area of a home it makes sense to have those areas respond without consideration for the rest of world but if I’m standing in my bedroom or closet without apparel wondering which apparel I should wear the daily forecast makes sense, but if I’m already with apparel and maybe I want to know if the backyard is different from the weather station 100miles from my home and I should grab a wind breaker or a hoodie then the voice command would have a different context.
The command difference of Hey whats the weather vs Hey whats the temp outside. Something that basic voice assistants can’t figure out currently.
This can also extend to the delineation of having mini-splits in a home that control smaller sections of the home rather than the traditional american style of one big honking HVAC central unit.
Now I realize that there’s quite a few posts about grouping or nesting and a lot of nope. However it would be great if we could all push this up and give it a fighting chance as this would be IMO a big feature addition.
But, one key reason that there isn’t a way to nest areas is that a strict hierarchical structure might create more problems than they solve. This can already be seen with Areas being used as a target for an action. Certain entity domains like light and switch are used for purposes other than what many users think of as lights and switches. These can include screens, indicator lights, reset/reboot “switches”, etc. Injudicious use of the switch.turn_on action targeted across an area could end up resetting multiple devices… nested Areas could exacerbate that over multiple rooms.
Currently, there is no intent to cover that situation so sub-areas or area grouping would not solve the problem. The only intent that gets a temperature value only works for climate entities i.e. thermostats, which would not be outside. Assigning an alias to the desired temperature sensor can work in some cases/languages, otherwise you would need to create a custom intent.
A large number of HA users do not have central heating but instead have radiators with electronically controlled valves, so this is not a new concept. Areas that cover a single “section” can be given a label and that label can act as the target for any climate actions. Alternatively, you can still use the old-style groups to control multiple climate entities in a single action like:
Aside from the labels, you can’t add areas to multiple floors, not really a nesting solution. It would help with the temp sensors, but with lights it would be nice to say hey turn off the house lights or if you had an open floor plan say turn off that area but not the whole floor. Same with mini splits, you might have a split where one unit does multiple areas, like the east side of the home, and so you’d want them to respond from various rooms.
Sure I guess you can do this with labels but then you are having to label everything individually everywhere as opposed to things following the overall structure and then changing ones that might be an exception. Not everyone wants to spend 3 weeks setting up their system and devices just to get a few automations going.