I have ESPHome devices that are seasonal, mainly AC (Midea) and when removing them for the winter, Home Assistant automations breaks because the device is unavailable.
There should be a way to mark them seasonal so when they are offline, automation don’t break or disable automatically.
Nice! Other use case: that Shelly you use for the Christmas lights in the tree which is part of an automation of scene… Offline 50 weeks pretty year
Isn’t that called labels?
I think it’s not about labelling things, but about making HA better handle devices that are not meant to be enabled 24/7 all year.
I have a similar situation with irrigation devices. logically do not make sense to keep connected and with batteries for months for nothing.
If are unavailable, a lot of “false-repairs” alerts start to be launched.
NOTE: disable do not works as automation keep failing, and specially for Zigbee devices you can not disable one device.
hey @mguaylam thanks for the prompt! I work at Nabu Casa on Home Assistant, and I was actually debating about seasonal devices too… afaik the automations should work with unavailable devices… What kind of error does the automation give you?
I had the same issue after Christmas last year but wonder if it’s now possible with labels 
I’m not sure if there is functionality that allows disabling everything (entities, automations, etc.) with a specific label (or combination of labels) assigned. If not that would be amazing. It would allow quickly enabling seasonal devices and automations but also enable other use cases, like disabling everything with “Unstable” label when finished playing around with new automations for the day.
Edit: just confirmed that it’s possible to enable / disable automations by label but looks like entities cannot be disabled by actions 
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I have multiple zigbee smart plugs that I use for Christmas lights, at the end of the season they get unplugged and packed away. I never disable the automations or do anything with the plugs, just unplug them. The next year plug them in and everything joins back up and works. Have been doing this since the early days of HA and ZHA without issue or warnings, never considered it to be an issue until I saw this thread.
Can you add an input_boolean.irrigation_season and add a condition to the automation to trigger when it’s on?
Really, this WTH seems unnecessarily complicated.
Yes, exactly, afaik Automations should still work when devices are unavailable, maybe its something specific to the setup - asking to be sure
I achieve this with a Summer/Winter input_boolean (Summer is on, Winter is off).
I like the idea of a Summer/Winter label too.
I’m not sure why you would want to disable a device rather than just have your automations check the date or if the season switch is set one way or another.
You could also have the cards disappear from the ui with the same switch.
Not saying it is irrelevant, I just can’t see the use case though.
I’m not sure about automations not working, but for me the use case would be wrt Watchman reports.
I use the Watchman integration to check for things that I may have accidentally broken, but the info gets cluttered by all seasonal devices that have been unplugged - primarily z-wave “wall warts” to control Christmas lights.
I thought this was one of the reasons NOT to use devices in automation, but use entities of those devices instead. Because automation with missing devices become unavailable. That is what the community guide says at least. Why and how to avoid device_ids in automations and scripts