Everything You Need to Automate in Home Assistant

The Home Assistant Automation UI got a big update early in 2024, so lets run through everything you need to get started automating the boring stuff.

Video Chapters

00:00 - Home Assistant Automation 101 - Intro
01:00 - Home Assistant Automation 101 Prerequisites
01:55 - The Home Assistant Automation UI Editor and Automation Basics
04:16 - Fire an automation When or add a Trigger to a Home Assistant Automation
07:40 - Add an And if or condition to your Home Assistant Automation
11:01 - Add an Action or Then do to your Home Assistant automation
13:47 - Helpful Tips for Home Assistant Automations

Video on my Text Notify Script:

Who am I?

My Name is Jeff. I am an DIY-er and Automator of boring things. And, of course, a huge Home Assistant fan. Oh, I also live in a house that tweets.

Follow Me:

And if you like this video you could always fuel my automation habit -

One Time Donation:
Cash App: $slackerlabs
.

[gerryf]

Great tutorial for an old rookie. Seems like a lot of the recent UI changes have made a lot of the videos out there mostly obselete or at least confusing. This video is very helpful. You might want to add a video about labels and categories to help automation organized and multi- use.

[MrRacesv]

I just did something very similar but alarms drive my dogs crazy so I made certain lights turn red to alert us in addition to the phone notification and I also added in turning off the water to the house with a zigbee valve. Thanks for all the great content!

[major_west]

The UI automation editor rocks! Automations built with it are typically correct by construction, with very little debug required. I originally used NodeRed for automations, and being a NodeRed newbie, was often frustrated when even simple automations would not work.

[ThamerJO]

Thank you for your efforts and I was really looking for someone to explain it in details. Please consider similar videos for other kind of triggers and actions

[holohane]

Hi Jeff, thanks for another great video. Have been using home assistant for a good few years but it’s no harm to go back to basics once in a while and see what’s new.

[Saturn]

I gave you a big thumbs up even though I didn't learn anything in this video mainly because the content is exactly what I would've liked to know. Although, I put Restart as the mode for all my automations. When turning lights on, it can feel laggy if you wanna turn them off, and they're still in a transition phase. Like if the motion sensor sees you, it waists for that to play out before letting you turn off the lights.

I have motion sensors and button presses in the same automation, but when a button is pressed, it disables the motions sensors though a toggle and then turns the toggle back off when you press "Off" from a button. That way, I can keep the lights on when I'm in the room.

With Restart, it lets some things immediately turn off. I have it set a timer to turn back on the motion sensors as part of a sequence in Actions. This is all super complex though. My latest idea is to have the button's "hold off" or just "hold" turn off motion sensors since the only way I have it setup to do that right now is when turning on the lights, and sometimes, I want them off, so I can make the lights brighter at night if I'm working on something.

This is all stuff I'd love to see in a video because I think I'm doing it wrong.

Lastly, I've been thinking hard about Scenes. I use them a ton with LIFX lights, but I'm buying other brands now and using Home Assistant for those. If a light goes bad, or I change it out, I have to remake the scene. It'd be great if I could create a script for each scene and then when I swap out a light, all I have to do is swap out the colors for that light in the script rather than going in the scene and trying to remember what I had them set to.

Home Assistant has a lot of confusing things like this.

[robertdalga]

Another great vid Jeff! I was wondering about what all is involved in setting up a 'guest mode'? Maybe another vid perhaps?

[waynenocton]

Couldn’t agree more on the forums, I ask a specific question, mention that I have read the pages and just don’t quite understand, and I get snotty responses or a simple link to the same pages I’ve already read 20 times.

[ByStandR]

Hi Jeff, thanks this is another great video. wondering if you could explain the notify script you setup for this and how it works ??

[powertbs]

The use case for parallel is when you have multiple triggers like timing and and you set that at 7 should turn on the ac for 2 hours but at 8 you want to turn off a light you can put them together in one automation

[Zerogenome]

Why this guy only have 24K sub? I'm newbie and I thought this well explain video deserved more so I leave this comment to help with yt algorithm.

[bartbjorri]

Thank you for real explaining instead of just showing what to click. Kudo's

[mrxmry]

when your basement floods and no-one is home, wouldn't you want to know right away? by the time you get home the damage could be a lot worse.

[wapphigh]

Hi Jeff - There have been so many changes over the last 12 months, it's difficult to get yr head around it and keep up to be honest. Some things are changed- without any pre warning or firm instructions what to do. Honestly they seem at times, beyond mere mortal long standing HA users.. even seasoned programmers! (see below!) So my question is this. Is there anybody offering a paid service to log in (securely of course!) repair, spruik and clean up a HA project? Thanks!

[gozirraizroose]

So would I use automations to create an alias for a voice command? For instance, I can currently tell Alexa "turn off the entryway light" or "shut off the entryway light" and it works. I'm moving away from Alexa and using the new Assist, and it only understands "turn off the entryway light", if I tell it "shut off the entryway light" it doesn't understand.

[vicb]

My automation turns on the bedroom light and says there is water on the Alexa. My phone is do not disturb at night.

[DaveSomething]

The Dungeon is getting... MOIST!
it also broadcasts on all the googles in the house...

[KimmoJaskari]

So when you're home, you want to be notified of a water leak, but if you're not at home you want to remain blissfully ignorant until you get home? 😬 Relatively basic when, if, do is pretty comprehensible. It gets a lot weirder if you need to do anything more advanced. I work with computers and HA and automation logic still makes me feel like someone should be paying me to do this work - at home. 😀

[eugsmiley]

I mistakenly read that headline as "Here's a List of Things You Need to Automate in Home Assistant" instead of "Here's How to Automate the Boring Stuff".