Hi HASS Community,
Over the past few years, I’ve been using scene.create and scene.apply automations for presence detection in Home Assistant. While these features work to some extent, I often find myself wishing for a more intuitive solution for scene management—something that feels more integrated and aligns better with the way Home Assistant manages spaces like zones and groups.
Challenges with Current Scene Management
- Timing Issues with scene.create:
One recurring issue is that scenes don’t always get saved at the “right” moment. Sometimes, the state I want to capture is already out of sync by the time scene.create is triggered. This leads to frustration when trying to restore the expected state later.
- Loss of Specific States:
When using groups for managing lights (or other entities), if I turn a group off and later turn it back on, everything in the group is reactivated. This overrides the previous state where only certain lights might have been on. I’ve noticed this particularly with the discontinuation or disabling of the scene preview feature, which made managing specific entity states easier.
Proposed Solution: Zone-Level Scene Management
What I envision is a zone-level scene management feature that leverages Home Assistant’s existing zone framework. For example:
• A global toggle for a room or zone that saves the states of all entities within that zone.
• The ability to restore the zone to its previous state, only reactivating what was on and keeping off what was off.
• This feature could work intuitively with automations, where instead of manually defining which entities to track, the system inherently understands the boundaries of a zone.
Why This Matters
A feature like this would improve usability and make scene management feel more seamless and natural. It would align with Home Assistant’s strengths in contextual, zone-based automation while eliminating the trial-and-error experience of manually defining scenes with scene.create and scene.apply. I believe that HomeKit kind of does this already, and I wish to have this here.
I believe this addition would be a significant step forward for users who rely on presence detection and dynamic state management for their smart home setups.
Would love to hear thoughts from others on this! Let me know if you have similar experiences or additional ideas to expand on this concept.
Thanks for considering this! 