Many useful automations would be made easier if Home Assistant knew which Areas opened onto each other.
Example
You might want presence sensors to trigger not only the lights in an occupied Area, but also in each adjacent Area (perhaps at a lower brightness).
Ergonomic benefits:
- When moving through the building, each Area ahead and around you gets illuminated, not just the Area you’re currently standing in - so there’s less chance of bumping into or tripping over objects in your path, or needing to pause until the illumination catches up with your movements.
- Occupants in open-plan areas aren’t “trapped” in a relatively small pool of light in an otherwise dark larger space.
- Less eye strain from trying to see into dark adjacent spaces.
- Reduced anxiety due to eliminating nearby pools of shadow.
- Less need to manually switch lights on or off.
Here’s an example of someone trying to do something similar.
Problem to solve
Users attempting to implement automations like that need to store Area adjacency data somewhere, but where?
Proposed solution
HA should provide each Area with an attribute called “Adjacent areas”, which presents a list of all other Areas and lets the user select zero or more Areas from that list. (The list should not be restricted by floor, because for example a stairwell Area might be adjacent to rooms on several floors.)
Conclusion
If you want an easy way to store neighbouring-Area data in Home Assistant, please upvote this feature request!