Sometimes I want to say “Ok Google, turn off outside”, or turn off downstairs. Unfortunately, my idea of outside includes both the “room” Outside, which contains sprinklers, pool pump light, and also my back and front porch which have their own devices. Likewise, my downstairs contains many rooms.
Is there a built-in structure to add a room to a room, or am I relegated to using scenes?
I dont know if this answers your question directly, but you can link input_booleans to alexa. Then have that input_boolean turning on be the trigger to turn off everything you want in that “room”.
Caveat being that the name of the input_boolean would have to be unique and not used for any other entity exposed to alexa.
For an example, I have an input boolean called “Heidi” for my wifes Highlander. I have automation (through node red but you could do same through HA), that when Heidi is on, it starts her car and cracks open garage. So in morning my wife just says, “Alexa, turn on Heidi”
You might be able to achieve what you want using groups:
Alternitively you can target an Area in a service call but this would rely on your Areas being carefully defined to include exactly the entities that you wish to control:
I think a proper solution must be to handle the switch at the top of a room card in lovelace as an entity within another room. How can I reference my Back Porch switch in this picture and duplicate it as an entity within another room?
You can’t. That switch is simply an enumeration of everything listed in that particular Entities card.
Your best bet (and simplest path) is to create a group and name it something like “Back Porch”. Then, use group.turn_on and group.turn_off service calls to toggle everything in the group.
Which would be fine on a small setup. I have ~500 entities. 3/4 of them are downstairs. There must be a way to group rooms or this idea is not practical.
Trust me, I get what you are saying as I have well over 1000+ entities in my setup and group and scene management is a huge pain point. Especially groups as there is no easy UI to manage groups yet.
You can have groups within groups. You can also have an entity in multiple groups as well.