I reckon there is a recommended way to organize (and name) your devices when you have several different locations integrated in the same HA instance with the current limitations on areas and floors.
Maybe I have a house, an apartment and a summer house with different areas for different purposes, one residence might have a pool area, maybe one location have an outhouse and so on. Which concepts should I use to have them reasonably organized in HA for automation and presentation purposes?
Maybe there’s already a comprehensive thread about the tradeoffs when you pick one way over the other that I can’t find?
Just use what makes the most sense to you.
Or random names like I do, it’s all good.
I have fans named George, Georgie, Mary, among others (for example). I have a button to turn off an announcement called Dick. It’s great fun to tell Google to turn on… that one, expecially when company is over.
Thanks, I know too little about HA to know what makes sense.
I’ve gotten the creeping suspicion HA is missing abstractions for proper management (how to change a meter or actuator somewhere without breaking the system when it comes to history and automations) so I guess there are hacks people use depending on tradeoffs they’ve discovered depending on which integrations they use and so on.
I want to stand on the shoulders of giants and not have to discover all quirks and limitations on my own. For some reason there is no location concept, only non nestable areas and floors right. Which sort of limits you alot in how you can model your physical space. So what do people do and how does it affect automations and devices and metering history and so on.
Don’t overthink. Install an instance at each. Apartment, home, whatever (you should anyway because you don’t want signaling going over the internet for lights etc.) Use an integration in HACS called remote Home Assistant to glue the instances together. Each will be addressable on it’s own and viewable by the others.
You make up what format works for you and use that to name device and entities, like sensor.house_floor_room_device.
And whenever you need to work with your sensors then for god sake use entity ID and not device ID.
In the community guide section here on the forum you will find a cookbook post.
Read it and you will avoid many caveats.
Using device ID sets you up for chaos in the future when you need to replace a device. History might be lost and automations need to be altered.
For some reason there is no location concept, only non nestable areas and floors right. Which sort of limits you alot in how you can model your physical space. So what do people do and how does it affect automations and devices and metering history and so on.