In these times when everything is increasing in price, especially electricity, I took up the challenge to see how much we could save without us feeling a decrease in what we can do when we are at home. I started looking into all our devices being in standby mode in…
Category: Home Assistant
Setting a default theme in Home Assistant for all users
Sometimes I come across some nice themes for Home Assistant, and when I have used them myself for a period of time, I like to push them to all users in our Home Assistant. Default each user can change the theme in their user settings, and there is no general…
Securing your Home Assistant with automatic backups to the cloud
I’ve invested tons of hours in our Home Assistant installation, so it would be a disaster to loose all the work if something goes wrong. Home Assistant has backup functionality build in. It can take full backups and snapshots, but it stores the backup files on the local machine running…
Get Home Assistant talking through Sonos speaker using Googles Text-To-Speech service
In our house we have different automations that use our Sonos speakers to say something. For example if Aurora (our daughter) opens her window, the speaker in the kitchen tells us. Our alarm also warns us if any intrusion is registred at night when we are sleeping. To do this…
Why have a Smart Home?
This is one of the most common questions to me around our smart home. Why have it? Well, the easy answer would be: Because we can! The choice to have a smart home actually evolved along the way. It started as a small thing, and just grew and grew. I’m…
Implementing house mode in your Home Assistant
One of the first things I did when starting up with Home Assistant was to create a solution for different house modes. Basically I wanted to be able to put the house in different modes, and these modes should be a huge part of how we automate our house. For…
Updating Home Assistant without anything breaking
One of my primary and very important goals working with Home Assistant is that I want to be able to update Home Assistant at any time without anything breaking in my setup, for example integrations, automations, scripts etc. I simply don’t want to have to do rework after an update,…
Split your configuration up in multiple files
After some time doing a lot of stuff in configuration.yaml, I found that I needed to make a much more clean setup, where things were split up in multiple files instead of all automations being in automations.yaml etc. Basically my configuration.yaml and automations.yaml files contained thousands of lines making them…
Integration to the IHC platform
Our house has an IHC installation, which should give a smarter home. It does, but not as smart as I want it to be, but lets be fair. IHC is an old platform developed for several years ago before smart home was a thing. One of the reasons why I…
secrets.yaml – what is it for?
Home Assistant has a secrets.yaml file in the root folder of the configuration. The purpose of this file is to store usernames and passwords instead of having these set directly in the different YAML files. You can also store other things in the file, like IP-addresses, tokens etc. In your…