11 Essential Tips For Home Assistant Beginners!

Home Assistant has evolved a lot over the last few years with new features and big changes along the way, here are 11 essential tips for Home Assistant beginners that I wish I knew when I first started out!

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0:00 - Intro
0:28 - Naming
3:31 - Areas
4:18 - Backups
5:55 - Updates
6:50 - Virtual Machines
7:45 - Resist
8:30 - Resist harder
9:05 - Labels + Categories
11:15 - Stop Exposing
12:10 - Aliases
12:56 - Blueprints

[smccrode]

The thing that can be difficult, but I still recommend: Testing. For example, test what happens if you lose internet, lose power in a certain area, or lose power to home assistant. Also, test your backups ocassionally by restoring from them.

[TalKintush]

I’ve entered the smart home scene 4 months ago and your videos helped me reach professional levels, thanks man!

[KimmoJaskari]

I got a hold of an old NUC (inherited from my day job in fact). I dedicated it to HA and it runs on bare metal. Way easier to ensure that the USB dongles and other stuff has a direct connection. HA is worth it. I have another machine to run VM's on, that runs XCP-NG which I prefer to Proxmox - although, USB passthrough and the like is not as friendly there as Proxmox, I believe. Anyway, thanks for the video... since I was watching anyway I finally did some renaming and organizing and connected the NAS for backups... just been really lax about all that.

[kotgc]

HA is great, the hardest bit is the network and device setup.
Imho, RaPi desktop OS (ARM efficient low power wattage to leave on 24 hours; RISC-V in '25) running type 1 hypervisor (Proxmox (mainstream), KVM (GUI and kernel efficient) or Xen (enterprise level security) running FOSS router and HA.
LAN devices are hard to find for noobs, as shops push the WAN cloud controlled grift. When cloud control develops blockchain solutions so users are paid for their data rather than the 3rd parties earning billions (money for nothing), I might consider WAN Cloud devices (with an option for privacy on or off).

[JoshsSmartHome]

Nice video. Home Assistant is awesome, and it definitely is getting easier!

[dano]

Thanks. As a beginner you have helped enormously.
Cheers 👍🇦🇺

[TikTok-ilhx]

When you update the device and entity names, will they be updated everywhere or will you have to go back and fix existing automations etc?

[yerunski]

What i do now, for example if I want to look for blueprints as mentioned in the video, I don't go to Settings etc. and hope to find it. Instead, I hit the 'c' key from anywhere in HA and just type what i'm looking for. Same for entities, I just hit the 'e' key and type the name of the entity i'm looking for. Such time savers 😎

[compudude]

I'm a bit surprised there's no auto-update mechanism in HA. That said, I prefer more control... as you said, it would be nice to be able to set up rules along the lines of what you described, to govern when auto-updates can happen.

I'm just happy to be running a current version again. Running HA in a Docker container on Synology was a nightmare every time I wanted to update anything, not to mention no HACS or similar integrations without a ton of work, not to mention the nightmare of adding USB passthroughs for zigbee dongles, oy. Soooo happy to have finally moved it into a regular VM (still on the Synology) so the built in updating tools and add ons just work normally.

[gerryf]

Blueprints might get more use if there was a better way to search through the pile.

[bhushangadiya]

I have a house with 8 rooms and multiple people. Whats the best naming convention you would suggest for all the lights and switches and fans and the sockets

[hichamel]

Thanks Lewis, great vidéos. In my case, i update lately after 8months and i still struggling with some issues.

[CraigTinson]

beat me.. lol... I had to pause the video.. because when you are scrolling through the devices I noticed a "Dave"... thats what I've called my voice assistant.. with a "ok dave" wake-word.. lol

[Ballissle]

Im doing everything here except im using virtual box. Is proxmox free? Can i run it within debian in headless mode? What are the benefits for home assistant?

So far ive had 0 issues with virtual box. So not sure what the downsides are.

[impy]

Really useful thanks, I've had HA running for a while in a container, just doing lights stuff, but recently moved to HA OS on Proxmox as I got a mini PC for getting into homelabbing. Wanted/needed HACS, recently got some Matter smart plugs for both power management and energy tracking, looking at a Air Quality sensor too, having asthma and seasonal hayfever, I've noticed at times my breathing struggles so interested to monitor if there's any correlation. So I'm getting into HA much deeper than just lights now, I'd say I'm more of an advanced beginner still, I have reasonable technical knowledge. I found the Categories and Labels explanation really helpful, and a good reminder/warning about when you expand. Also about NAS backups, I've got a NAS but hadn't setup the storage, although I do have Proxmox doing weekly backups of VMs/CTs to my NAS, so I could always restore the whole VM, but good to have HA backing up too.

[LifeWithMatthew]

I did a whole video about taking a 1L PC and installing Proxmox on it to manage Home Assistant VMs and a Docker VM and someday might even follow that up with a video on using some of the extra power to run Plex and Arr containers. The point is, I'm a huge fan of running home assistant in a virtual machine 🤣

[waynenocton]

I have an issue with my voice assistant, like if I say, Alexa, turn bedroom lamp on. Alexa will come back and say, did you mean bedroom lamp? I’m like yes, bedroom lamp is what I said, why are you asking me if what I said, is what I meant? Lol.

[sdfhjklhsfdjdsflhkds]

All good advice Lewis, although I would qualify the update strategy a bit. I still find the odd breaking change due to bugs an issue, which is why I am almost always 2-3 weeks behind. Not as bad as it used to be, and backups generally help, but there's been a couple of "fun" updates this year that remanded me to be wary.

[samiraslan]

can you make us a video how to move from VM to Proxmox??

[michaelha]

I have an old mac mini with virtualbox on it. What should I do instead?