WTH are floors and areas useless

[Linus1]

I might be lost but humble… Anyway.

Since I moved from an apartment to a house with three floors and 15 rooms (nah, only 180 square meters built 1937) Home Assistant has become a hassle to manage. Why is floors, areas and labels so useless(?)? I can add devices and entities to floors, areas and labels, and then what?

What I’m suggesting…

Floors and areas should have entities or attributes.

Let’s say I add several temperature sensors, one for each area in a floor. Why doesn’t my floor get a min, max and average temperature attribute/entity? The same is applicable to all domains… Why do I have to write a template to know if a light is on in an area or on a floor? Why do I have to write a template to know if something is on/off or open/closed in an area/floor? Why do I get so little for adding something to an area or a floor?

I’m not a contributor to Home Assistant, and I can only imagine how much work this would render, but I do really think that Home Assistant should focus on floors and areas. When I’m building things in Home Assistant it’s not a fuzzy cloud, it’s floors and rooms, almost all the time.

I should be able to use floors, areas and ambiguous labels in actions.

I’m tired of updating all my automations as soon as I add something to my house (or change the entity id). Why can’t I use a label in my automation? Well… I can. But I must create a label for each floor, area and use-case instead of just a label for each use-case.

Targets in actions should be “equal any” or “equal all”. “equal any” meaning as it is now, and “equal all” meaning floor = x AND label = y, or area = x AND label = y.

Sincerely thanks for everything to everyone. Home Assistant is amazing.

[petro]

@Linus1

I should be able to use floors, areas and ambiguous labels in actions.

You can

@Linus1

“equal all” meaning floor = x AND label = y, or area = x AND label = y.

That can be done if you use a template

{{ floor_entities('my_floor') | select('in', label_entities('my_label') |  list }}

[clintm (Clint)]

I believe your #1 request is similar to my post here

WTH Add devices to floor (or a meta area?)

I have google cast speaker groups for a floor of our house, and the whole home as well. These are shown as cast and music assistant devices. It feels wrong to not assign a area to these devices, but any area would be sorta incorrect as the device doesn’t “belong” to any one room nor is it “docked” in one room like a vacuum. Currently these multi-area devices must either be put in a custom made meta area or just be left area-less. With the advent of floors it would be nice to assign a device to a…

[clintm (Clint)]

Also if we do #1 it’d have be more careful than just blindly using all temperature sensors. I have devices reporting CPU or ESP temps, Freezer/Fridge temps, and more. So there would have to be a way to at least select what entities go into the averages.

[Mariusthvdb (Marius)]

floor_entities() ?

that would be great and I remember it was on the verge of being added, but it never saw the light?

where is that WTH/FR, it must be written up some time ago

[petro]

@Mariusthvdb

where is that WTH/FR, it must be written up some time ago

None exist yet, have at it (it’s needed)

[Mariusthvdb (Marius)]

@petro

None exist yet, have at it (it’s needed)

please see WTH, where are the floor_entities()