I’ve been using Home Assistant for a while but I don’t have a ton of IoT devices so I don’t have a ton of automations set up.

My most useful though is an alert that triggers when my garage door has been open for ten minutes, and then again every ten minutes after until it has been open for an hour when it will automatically close.

Accidentally left the garage door open all night at least twice before this and thankfully nothing happened but the automation has prevented this at least twice as well.

Also gives me peace of mind in case I accidentally open it when I’m away.

I’ve got a few fun ones:

At night, my cat sometimes gets the zoomies, so I have a projector pointed at a wall with a motion sensor. When he goes on his tear through the house while we’re sleeping, the projector turns on and plays a video of strings moving on the wall. This tires him out without him screaming at us to play with him. It turns off again after a few minutes with no motion.

The lights and Roku screens in my office are on a motion sensor, but are also linked with a seat sensor so they don’t turn off when I’m at my desk. Sitting at the desk also sends a Wake on LAN packet to my computer. Sitting at my electronics workbench changes the lights to bright white with another seat sensor.

Lights (HA), desktop wallpaper (with Wallpaper Engine), and in-computer RGB (using OpenRGB) change from blue/pink during the day to dark red/orange at sunset so being in my office late doesn’t mess with my sleep.

A macro button next to my keyboard disables my screens and turns on a fan pointed at my VR area for workouts.

• All my lights turn on and off based on motion sensors
• Through the unofficial community Mila integration, I control my air purifiers based on different circumstances, like whether the house is empty.
• Collect indoor air quality info from my Airthings to view in Grafana

I love my door sensor announcements. Garage opens? Google Home goes “GARAGE OPEN”. Front door blows open at 11pm because it wasn’t closed properly? “FRONT DOOR OPEN… all home lights come on”

Just security stuff. So much customization that other products don’t offer.

My tankless hot water heater is controlled via Home Assistant too. Shuts off the circulation loop at 11pm~630am. Saves a ton of gas!

My Air Quality monitoring. I monitoring CO2, VOCs, PM and such. I then have automations run the air exchanger. They say air inside is 5X more polluted then outside I have the opposite.

I’m impressed, my best I feel is to turn on the outside fans when a person is detected and the temp is over 86 (I don’t know why I picked 86, seemed appropriate at the time)

A few automations are running in my house:

• Turned the nightstand light into a wake-up light, which distinguishes between weekdays and weekends,
• Kitchen light turns on and off based on sunset and midnight with random offset respectively,
• Garbage collection notifications,
• Introduced an extra (wireless) light switch in the hallway, which controls a Shelly connected to the light. The original light switch is still intact, however it is positioned at an unconvenient location.

In the coming period I want to:

• Automate the shutters and combine that with a light sensor.
• Introduce a routine that starts the washing machine and/or drying during the day based on the amount of incoming solar power. Not sure yet how to do this, since the washing machine has a physical start button via touch.

Which addon did you use for the paperless-ngx integration?

The ones I use the most are:

• Turning on lights and setting specific scenes when I turn on TVs in my bedroom, living room and theater room.
• Brighten lights whenever Plex is paused or finishes playing, which is great in a dedicated home theater where the lighting is very dark when watching a movie. This has actually helped improve many hang out nights with friends because the moment after a movie finishes is less awkward, leading more naturally into a nice conversation before every heads home.
• Reminder notifications for when washing machine or dryer cycles finish, or when my garage door has been open for more than 15 minutes (unless I override that with a toggle on my dashboard).
• Turning off all of my lights and switches when I leave the house, unless a boolean variable is flipped (e.g. if someone else is at my house w/o me, which is unusual since I live alone). Well, not quite everything, there are a few devices like a couple power monitoring smart pugs that always remain on.

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One of my favorites is setup with a large (1242 LED’s) WLED strip on my front porch. I have a motion sensor that is setup to trigger a switch to a bright white when the strip is on or if we get home and the presence detection picks us up and sets the strip to stay that way for a certain amount of time. The strip has a few different random settings that it can use when turning on as well so one night it may be a rainbow and another night it may be a solid color that walk around the strip changing one LED at a time. Comes on automatically at sunset and turns off at 11pm but until 6 am the strip can still come on with motion or presence detection.

The other one controls my electric water heater. I have 3 temp sensors, one near the top heating element location, one near the bottom element heating location, and a third on the water output line. The original temp controllers are still in place and set the maximum temp so the tank can never go over acceptable levels even if the ESP8266 fails in an on mode. Then I let the temp ramp down at a certain time of the evening and ramp back up in the morning for use throughout the day. But lets say you come home late and need a shower, when the output temp goes over a certain point after the system has started to ramp down it will kick the heater back into it’s regular mode until the temp drops below a certain threshold. It also uses the HA app to track where we are located and I have two zones that keep the water heater going, those are home which just barely covers the property and near home which is within about 30 miles of home. Once everyone who is tracked goes outside of those zones the temp ramps back down to the overnight setting and ramps back up when we get into the near home zone.

I have a ton of other things I want to implement like lights that turn on red automatically after a certain time of day so you can walk around at night and not kill your night vision. Right now I am working on the house as the electrical, plumbing, and a ton of other stuff needed work. But when I am done my cheap old $18K house will be a fully integrated smart home.

I have my house switch to night mode after a certain amount of time after sunset. During night mode:

• turning my computer on or off will toggle my desk light.
• if my cellphone is put over my wireless charger it will turn off my bed light (or turn it back on if I remove it).

I don’t have a lot of automations yet, but a really useful one has been using smart plugs to detect when the laundry machines are running so that Home Assistant can send alerts when they finish.

Turning on heated blankets at night, turn off after I plug in my phone to charge.

Climate control in every room.

Made dumb standing desk is now smart and goes up and down randomly every 45-60 minutes while I’m working.

I’m tracking my HVAC filter and rest it’s 90days with an NFC tag

Loosely followed an online how-to to create a tracking chore list using NFC tags for my son’s allowance. Automations to nag him on trash night to gather/take out the trash.

A simple Automation that turns on a fan in the basement when the outside temp is above out AC setting to help distribute cool basement air.

Outside security lights on/off at dusk/dawn

House auto arms/disarms (Alarmo) when everyone leaves or someone arrives (via life 360 integration)

On trash day, after noon if my son scans (NFC) one of the trash cans, the garage door opens to let him in/put them away.

My son gets a notification when he comes home from school if we got mail (aka the mailbox was opened that day)

Those are the ones I can think of off the top of my head.