How to organise devices to make things easier to manage

As I have added more and more devices and repurposed items things in my list of devices is becoming confusing. I thought about using a naming scheme but that often has repercussions as the names get longer making them harder to use in automations etc.

I looked for a way to attach meta data i.e. How can I define something as a power plug then just pick that. Or maybe easily get to things currently defined as operating Christmas lights etc. If I could add meta data that says this I could easily find it or combinations of it. This does not seem to be there, or I am not understanding how to do it.

How do other people manage? How do you name new devices so you easily know what they are and where they are etc.?

I just use a decent naming convention.

But if you want to add “metadata” you can customize each entity (not device tho as far as I know) by customizing each entity to add the data as an attribute.

it’s goin to be A LOT of work to maintain tho.

thanks finity, i will do that. Don’t want to get too customised as that can end up badly so will just go for a naming convention and work from there.

I’m not sure why you would say that? How can simply adding an attribute to an entity turn out badly?

The more you customise systems the more likely they are to fall foul of some future change to the software. I’ve been caught many times in my day job by departments that have made customisations built on capabilities of the software that are little used that then become a liability when the software updates. Over time I’ve learned to avoid heading down that route

You are misunderstanding what I mean by “customizing”.

it’s nothing but modifying the specifics of an entity from within HA itself.

it’s got nothing to do with making it some third party thing.

here are the docs that discuss it:

and adding a custom attribute is nothing more than adding something like this to your configuration.yaml (or using an !include like I do):

homeassistant:
  customize:
    sensor.computer_room_motion_battery_level:
      battery_size: CR123A
      battery_quantity: 1

Here I have just added a couple of custom attributes to my battery level sensor giving me the battery data.

It’s perfectly safe to do.

ah, thank you finity, that makes a lot of sense.

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