I wanted a simple rule for my home: if someone changes a light manually, the presence automation should respect that choice for a while.
For example, you walk into a room and the light turns on. You turn it off to watch TV. The next presence event shouldn’t immediately turn it back on.
I put together Lighting Overrides, a custom integration that handles those temporary manual choices and gives control back to automation afterward.
With the default settings:
- A manual override lasts up to 30 minutes.
- Briefly leaving the room doesn’t cancel it.
- An ordinary override ends after a subsequent 10 minutes of continuous vacancy.
- If automation turns a light off and you quickly turn it back on, that correction is protected from presence sensor flickering until the override expires or you deliberately release it.
- You can also resume automatic control or extend the override yourself.
The override lives in Home Assistant, so it survives restarts and works with dashboards closed. It watches dashboard actions and configured linked switches, although physical switch detection depends on what the device reports.
It’s free, open source, and runs locally. Installation is available through a HACS custom repository or Git. Setup currently requires YAML, and your presence automation needs to delegate its light actions to the integration.
GitHub, installation, and examples
This is the first public release, tested on HA 2026.9.2. I’d appreciate reports from people using different switches and presence sensors, especially any cases where it resumes too early or holds an override longer than expected.