Five Best Practices in Home Assistant - Use this now!

These 5 best practices are things that you should follow when working with Home Assistant. Over the years I found that these are really helpful and I think they will help you too.

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00:00 Introduction
01:08 Best practice 1: Backup
01:54 Best practice 2: Use MariaDB
02:27 Best practice 3: Include entities in the recorder
04:02 Best practice 4: Naming Conventions
05:45 Best Practice 5: Trigger IDs

#homeassistant #homeautomation #bestpractice #bestpractices

[SmartHomeJunkie]

These are my 5 best practices! Tell me your best practices in the comments. I am really curious about that!

[accordxtc]

I totally missed the one in Trigger ID's, this will clean up my automations section immensely. Thanks for abyohet great video!

[Moutbiker]

my best practice is to watch all the videos from this channel. In my opinion, this is the best channel for HA configuration questions. Thank you very much.

[vaughanza]

Great video thanks, love to hear about more practices that help.

[cpepper]

I’m all about naming conventions in my professional career so to see you mention that made me excited lol. Great ideas!

[daryllvangeelen]

Thanks for this video it was really helpful

[JoseBerruezo]

Great video! I'd like to see more about security.

[emms-place]

Great video. I like number 5. I am definitely going to change my automations to work like that where applicable.
I follow a similar naming convention except i use the room location first and the domain.

[sganvik]

Another helpful video! Thanks and keep them coming😉

[EmiAgriDiY]

Great video 👏👏👏
Great channel 👍🏻 👍🏻 👍🏻

[piuswyss]

Another great video. I have implemented three best practices immediately and will do so with the rest soon. I really appreciate the brevity of your videos - no unnecessary stories, no self-congratulation, no sideswipes at others - just great. Thank you.

[asturpar]

Thanks very much for your hard work. I really enjoy your videos. On Tip #4, would you mind extending it a bit (eg how you name your other sensors, eg motion, temperature and even your Areas/Rooms? I think what you mentioned there is an excellent idea specially as your device database gets bigger... Thanks a lot

[jaap]

Once again an excellent video.
I like 4 and 5 since they are essential to start using early. The naming convention which considers groups is truly excellent.
Instead of trigger ID, I check the state as part of the choice. I think this is easier when combining various sensors or conditions.
As a bonus best practice: Using helpers or template sensors can help a lot to simplify detecting complex events reacting to those events. Instead of making an automation to turn off the lights when nobody is home, create a template sensor to detect that nobody is home and an automation to turn off the lights when the sensor is triggered. This way, adding a guest mode is much easier.
I'm pretty sure I got all of this from this channel as well.

[michaelschumann]

Thanks again for that great video. I wish I had watched all of them before I startet with home assistant. I also love your best practices. As I develop software for a living I already implemented naming conventions and backups. But your tipp with maria db I will follow immediately since I had two severe db crashes in the last years. Thanks for the other tipps too. I really love your videos as they really stand out compared to the many videos around where people explain trival things like rocket science. They are extremely helpful.

[WoottonRivers]

Great video, thanks!
Here's one of my best practices:
When you're installing an update (once you've read about and prepared for the breaking changes), always do this during daylight hours. Lights are likely to be big part of your smart home. If they stop working other household members will get upset fast.

[RobertAnthonyPitera]

First time I actually understood the use of Trigger IDs. I've been doing this with Wait Templates but I could never get them right using the UI - I could only set them up in YAML. Now I finally understand how they work! And BTW, I'm no noob; I've been using HA since the zero point days. Well done and thanks!

[MihaiKrieger]

My extra best practice is to have an admin-only dashboard containing the vitals of the host which is running the HA and monitoring it - CPU speed, usage, RAM speed, usage, and I have installed a temp and humidity sensor in the location where the device is physically located. I am using an Intel NUC with HA OS.

[MarkusBurrer]

I really think about to start from scratch on a new hardware and follow these five best practices

[TheSkepticSkwerl]

Oh dammit. Now I have to remake my automations for trigger IDs. Lol. But something I knew right away. Automation naming convention is crucial. I use something like...
Light: front door toggle state auto
Timer: front door enable timer from motion
Timer: front door cancel timer if turned off

It's a work in progress. But it's something like "device type actioned on" : "device name" "action" "trigger"

This way I can find automations quickly

[kerbalette]

This is great thankyou. Any tips on making our interface better? Using mushroom?