Hi everyone,
I’m Davide from Rome, Italy, and I’m happy to join the Home Assistant community.
I’m completely new to the Home Assistant world and also quite new to home automation in general, so I’m here to learn and hopefully get some advice on configurations and best practices.
Right now I already have a few devices connected and I’d like to start experimenting more. At the moment I have:
- several smart plugs
- a few smart bulbs
- 3 Nest cameras
- my car connected
- my phone connected
- the motors of 3 shutters connected (currently only the living room shutters)
I’m looking for suggestions on how to improve my setup, automate more things, and start testing useful ideas around the house.
So far I haven’t created any scenes or automations yet, but I’d really like to learn more about this part. I also connected the Telegram bot, so I’m interested in understanding how to use it in a smart way for notifications and simple controls.
Any tips for a beginner (especially good first automations/scenes to build) would be really appreciated. Thanks in advance!
I would advise patience. The learning curve is quite steep and often times the documentation is out of step with the current release.
There are a number of beginner’s guides, but I can’t find the link to them. Here’s one: 20 things I wished I knew when I started with Home Assistant here’s another The Home Assistant Cookbook - Index
When you create an automation, use the visual editor first. YAML editing is good for fine tuning or copying code from someone else.
I test my automation actions by writing a script so I don’t mess up what I’ve written in the automation or the automation won’t save because there is an error in it.
Design your idea before you start writing it. What is it you want to accomplish? One of my desires was to have a motion sensor turn on a light, but sometimes I wanted that light to be on all the time or off all the time. I ended up writing six automations with two helpers. Start with this one, automatically close your shutters at sunset and open them at sunrise (or whenever you usually get up)
Cloud based devices often don’t work if your internet goes down. The manufacturer can cease the service, sell it to another, or start charging for it. One thing is certain, the manufacturer collects data about your habits. Being open source and avoiding the cloud is one of HA’s tennents. I speak from experience.
If you live with other people, I would suggest your first few automations be things that only affect you. It usually takes a few revisions to get an automation right, and it’s best not to annoy everyone else in the house with your hobby.
One thing that can help with the above, and will be useful for many automations in the long run, is to spend some time and/or money getting presence detection for yourself and any other people in your household to be reliable and accurate. Depending on your situation, just using the companion app on your phone may be enough, but it can help to add at least one stationary device tracker based on integrations with your router or Bluetooth beacons that you keep on your keys or in your wallet.
Physical sensors… you didn’t mention any in your brief summary.
While you can do a lot with the time, date, sun, and other built-in components, physical sensors help provide both events for triggers and data for conditions that isn’t as rigid as time or the sun. For example, a sensor on a window can be used as a trigger to turn off the heating or air conditioning… or it can be used as a condition so that you are reminded that the window is open when you tell the shutters to close.
Hi and thanks to everyone for your suggestions. Now I’m starting to understand the importance of having sensors. Can you suggest some sensors that fit HA ecosystem?
I’m looking for something like this to insert in my wall socket. Does anyone knows something similar? Thank you
