Zones vs. Rooms vs. Groups

Configuration
1

I have a question regarding zones, rooms and groups.

Support for zones has improved a lot in HA v 2021.3.0 so I can imagine that I will be adding a lot of entities to their specific zone. But I am not sure what will be the best approach…

First of all, I think HA is a bit schizophrenic when it comes to zones, there is a ‘zone’ as a Geo location and a ‘zone’ as an attribute of entities. But they are not the same If I am not mistaken?

I like the way Apple handled their logic in HomeKit. A device is a member of a room and a room can be a members of a numbers of zones. Therefore it is easy to create a zone for a floor in your house. Or for inside and outside the home etc. I even abuse the zones in order to localise the name of a room. I live in the Netherlands and I put devices in a room like “woonkamer”, this room is a member of “living room” so I can refer to Siri in English. It helps when giving commands to the HomePod (not understanding Dutch yet).

HomeKit example:
ROOM:bedroom -> ZONE:first floor -> ZONE:upstairs -> ZONE:inside the house

How can I apply the same logic in HA? I guess I will have to use the ‘zone’ for the room because it can only be one zone per device/entity. Is it possible to group zones so all members of a zone become a member of a group? That would make it easier to maintain this setup. I would hate to have apply a group (as in a zone according to HomeKit logic). That said, is there an easy way to apply a HA zone to an entity without having to edit each one separately in the frontend? For example, with the customise.yaml setup?

Home Assistant example:
ZONE:bedroom -> GROUP:first floor -> GROUP:upstairs -> GROUP:inside the house

I would love to know how other users organise their rooms and zones!
Hope to get some good advice here…

2

HA uses Zones for geographic regions, related to device trackers (and other geolocation things).

Areas are for things like rooms, they’re large groups of related things.

Groups are for arbitrary collections of things.

So:

  • Zone: Inside the house
  • Area: Bedroom
  • Group: Two of the four lights
1 Like
3

Ok, I get it, not that schizophrenic after all! :slight_smile:

So basically areas in HA are what rooms are for HomeKit.

And does anyone know of it is possible to group areas together in groups?

In other words: what yaml code would bundle a number of areas in one group?

2 Likes
4

You can’t. Areas, sadly, don’t have an entity_id so they don’t really exist.

5

That’s a pity…