HomePrep — Household emergency preparedness in Home Assistant

[kakelakel]

Hi everyone!

I’ve been working on a Home Assistant integration called HomePrep, built around a fairly simple idea:

Household preparedness is easy to plan once — but much harder to actually maintain over time.

HomePrep is intended to make that maintenance part easier by bringing preparedness inventory, recurring checks, household goals and reminders into Home Assistant.

It currently includes:

• preparedness inventory for food, water, medicine, equipment and other supplies
• expiry date tracking
• optional images for inventory items
• recurring inspections and preparedness tasks
• reminders and Home Assistant notifications
• household preparedness targets
• guidance profiles that can be adopted as personal targets
• a dedicated HomePrep sidebar application
• native Lovelace cards
• multilingual frontend
• local-first storage inside Home Assistant

The sidebar app currently contains:

Overview · Inventory · Tasks · Targets · Guidance · Household · Settings

One of the goals has been to avoid turning this into a collection of templates and helpers that users have to assemble themselves. HomePrep installs as a normal custom integration and provides its own UI and Lovelace cards.

The Lovelace side includes cards for overall HomePrep status, inventory, categories, attention items, recurring tasks and inventory management. The main HomePrep cards combine both inventory and task status, so they can be used as a quick warning/status indicator on a dashboard.

Guidance

HomePrep currently includes curated preparedness guidance for:

• Sweden — based on MSB guidance
• Norway — based on DSB guidance
• a clearly labelled general HomePrep baseline for other countries

Guidance does not silently overwrite your own targets. Recommendations can be adopted and then become your own editable household targets.

Privacy / architecture

HomePrep is currently local-first and does not require an external account or cloud service.

Inventory, tasks, targets and configuration stay in your Home Assistant instance.

I’m also designing the data model with future standalone app / optional sync support in mind, but Home Assistant is not intended to become dependent on that.

Installation

Repository:

https://github.com/kakelakel/homeprep

At the moment HomePrep can be installed through HACS as a custom repository:

HACS → Custom repositories → add the repository as Integration

Then restart Home Assistant and add HomePrep from:

Settings → Devices & services → Add integration

Current status

HomePrep is under active development, but the core system is already working and usable.

I’m posting it now mainly because I’d like feedback from people outside my own setup.

I’m especially interested in:

• things you would expect a preparedness integration to track
• workflows that feel awkward or unnecessarily complicated
• important equipment/categories I may have missed
• ideas for useful Lovelace cards
• country-specific preparedness guidance worth supporting
• whether the overall concept is useful at all

Bug reports, feedback and feature ideas are very welcome.

GitHub:

https://github.com/kakelakel/homeprep

If you made it this far.. Thank you so much for your time <3

[kakelakel]

HomePrep 0.7 prerelease update

Have gotten some cool feedback through other channels regarding Containers and Checklists.

I thought it sounded quite relevant and found a way to make it fit and work together with what i already got, so it’s now part of the latest pre-release

Containers

You can now group preparedness items by where they are actually stored or what they are packed for.

Examples:

• Family Go Bag
• Basement Prep Crate
• Water container
• First aid storage
• Vehicle emergency storage

Containers can have a location, check dates and their own readiness state. Their status also reflects problems with the inventory stored inside them.

In the latest beta, containers can also have recurring checks that create normal HomePrep tasks, so things like checking a go bag or rotating stored water can become part of the same maintenance workflow as the rest of HomePrep.

Preparedness Plans

HomePrep now also has checklist-based preparedness plans.

The first templates cover:

• Fire safety
• Flood / water damage
• Rapid evacuation

Plans can contain things like evacuation routes, meeting points, equipment checks and household procedures.

Checklist items are also becoming more than simple checkboxes: they can now include descriptions/instructions and link directly to relevant inventory items or containers.

For example, a fire-safety checklist item such as:

“Fire blankets are available where appropriate”

can be linked to the actual fire blankets in your HomePrep inventory.

Plans now also support a review interval, so a plan can become due for review without automatically erasing the previous checklist state.

Dashboard / Lovelace improvements

Containers and Plans are now included in the overall HomePrep readiness picture as well.

The main HomePrep cards can reflect:

• Inventory
• Tasks
• Containers
• Plans

so a dashboard warning is more representative of the household’s overall preparedness state.

HomePrep Lovelace cards are also clickable and take you directly into the HomePrep sidebar app, while normal buttons and controls inside the cards still work as expected.

Next up

The next larger concept I’m looking at is Assets — permanent or semi-permanent household preparedness points such as:

• main water shutoff
• isolation valves
• floor drains
• sump pumps
• smoke alarms
• fire extinguishers
• leak sensors

That should make it possible to model not just supplies and plans, but also the critical parts of the home itself that need inspection or maintenance.

Feedback is still very welcome, especially around real-world household workflows and anything that feels awkward or overcomplicated.

[kakelakel]

HomePrep 0.8.0 is released

HomePrep 0.8.0 is now available.

This release is a fairly big step forward for the project. HomePrep is no longer just about keeping track of supplies — it now ties together inventory, storage, household infrastructure, recurring maintenance and preparedness planning into one system.

What’s new in 0.8

The biggest additions are:

• Household Assets
  Track important fixed or semi-permanent preparedness points such as water shutoffs, valves, floor drains, leak sensors, smoke alarms, extinguishers, electrical panels and generators.
• Asset images and instructions
  Add a picture, location and operating instructions so another household member can quickly identify the correct valve, panel or control.
• Shopping List
  Add manual shopping items and automatically create replacement entries for expired inventory.
• Improved Preparedness Plans
  Plan checklist items can now link to actual Inventory, Containers and Assets.
• Recurring checks for Inventory, Containers and Assets
  All recurring inspections now use the same HomePrep Task scheduling system, with automatic next-check calculation.
• New Readiness Overview
  The Overview now shows readiness bars for Inventory, Containers, Tasks, Assets, Plans and Targets, together with an overall readiness score, next actions and a compact attention queue.
• Improved navigation
  HomePrep now uses a compact horizontal grouped navigation menu for Preparedness, Maintenance, Plans & Guidance and Household.
• Improved Lovelace support
  The main HomePrep summary card can now be configured to show/hide and reorder Inventory, Containers, Shopping List, Tasks, Assets and Plans.

There are also a lot of smaller UI fixes, icon improvements, date synchronization fixes and polishing from the 0.7 beta series.

Still local-first

One thing that has not changed is the core philosophy:

HomePrep remains local-first and does not require a cloud account.
Your preparedness data stays in your Home Assistant instance.

If you are already running HomePrep, 0.8 should show up as a normal stable update in HACS.

As always, feedback is very welcome — especially now that the project has grown into a broader preparedness system and I am starting to use it more heavily in real household scenarios.

Prepare. Monitor. Be ready.