How I Use Home Assistant
I wrote a general overview of Home Assistant recently, but I wanted to follow up with how I actually use it. Home Assistant can do a staggering amount of things, and it’s easy to get overwhelmed when you first look at it. This post covers the things I use most and find most useful, explained for someone who might not be familiar with the platform yet.
Lighting Automations#
This is the first thing most people set up, and for good reason — it’s immediately useful and easy to understand.
My front porch lights and outdoor plugs turn on automatically an hour before sunset and off 30 minutes after sunrise. I never think about it. Seasonal changes are handled automatically because Home Assistant knows the exact sunrise and sunset times for my location every day.
I have arrival lighting that turns on the living room lights when someone comes home. It uses multiple triggers — the thermostat switching out of eco mode, a phone entering the home zone, or a Wi-Fi connection being detected — and only fires during daytime hours. There’s a toggle in the dashboard to disable it if I don’t want it for a while.
There’s also a vacation mode that simulates occupancy by turning lights on and off at natural times. Bedroom lights come on at 10 PM with a warm dim setting and turn off at 8 AM on weekdays. A scheduled lamp flips on at 5 PM and off at 11 PM. None of this requires me to do anything once it’s set up.
Washing Machine Notifications#
I have a power-monitoring smart plug on the washing machine. Home Assistant watches the power draw — when it goes above 10 watts, it knows a cycle started, and when it drops below 5 watts and stays there, it knows the cycle is done. It sends a push notification to my phone when the wash starts and a time-sensitive notification when it finishes.
The trick is debouncing. Wash cycles have periods where the drum stops briefly between stages, and power draw drops temporarily. The automation uses dead zones and repeat checks to avoid false positives. It works really well. I also track the status ( Washing / Finished) with a dropdown helper so it shows up as a badge on the dashboard while it is washing, then disappears when it has finished.
Presence Detection#
I have ESPHome ↗ presence sensors placed around the house. These are small BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) devices that detect how close my phone is to each one. Combined with Bermuda BLE Trilateration, Home Assistant can triangulate my position and know which room I’m in — not just whether I’m home or away. That opens up automations that aren’t possible with simple presence detection, like adjusting climate or lighting based on where in the house I actually am.
ESPHome is worth calling out specifically. It’s a framework for building custom smart home sensors using cheap microcontrollers. You define what the device does in a YAML config file, flash the firmware, and it integrates directly with Home Assistant over your local network. The presence sensors, an air quality monitor I have in my server closet, and Bluetooth proxies are all ESPHome devices. It’s one of the more powerful parts of the ecosystem once you start using it.
Water Leak Detection#
I have three IKEA water leak sensors placed near the washing machine, water heater, and under the kitchen sink. They connect via Matter over Thread, so they’re fast, low-power, and communicate locally without needing the internet. If any of them detect water, I get an immediate critical push notification to my phone with the alert sound. Once all sensors have been dry for 15 minutes, I get an all-clear notification.
This is the kind of thing you set up and hope never fires, but when it does, the early warning can save you thousands of dollars in water damage. The sensors cost about $10 each and since they run on Thread, they work even if your internet is down.
Dashboards#
Home Assistant dashboards are fully customizable, and I’ve built a mobile dashboard that I use constantly. The main view has badges across the top showing the current time, weather conditions, air quality index (color-coded by severity), sunrise/sunset times, front door lock status, package delivery count, and the status of things like the washing machine and 3D printer.
The main section has quick toggles for all lights and switches, media player controls, and network stats. I use conditional visibility heavily — the NAS health stats only appear when CPU or memory usage is elevated, media players only show when something is actively playing, and weather alerts only appear when there’s actually something to alert about. This keeps the dashboard clean instead of overwhelming.
There are dedicated views for cameras (live WebRTC streams from doorbell, indoor, and outdoor cameras), weather details, media controls across all rooms, 3D printer monitoring, and package tracking.
The custom frontend cards from the community make a big difference here. Mushroom cards give everything a clean, modern look. Mini Media Player provides compact audio controls. Auto Entities dynamically filters and displays things like battery levels across all devices. None of these come built in, but they’re easy to install through HACS (the Home Assistant Community Store).
Infrastructure Monitoring#
This one is more niche, but I find it useful. My Synology NAS shows up in Home Assistant with CPU usage, memory, temperature, drive health, and network throughput. I have an ESPHome-based AirGradient sensor in the server closet monitoring PM2.5, temperature, and humidity. NextDNS stats show up as well — total queries, blocked queries, and block ratio.
Having all of this in one place alongside the rest of the smart home data means I don’t need to open separate apps to check on infrastructure. If the NAS is running hot or the server closet humidity spikes, I’ll see it on the same dashboard where I check the weather.
Everything Else#
There’s a lot more I haven’t covered — Sonos multi-room audio controls, Nest camera integration via a Starling Home Hub for local access, Rachio sprinkler control, package tracking through Parcel, PlayStation and Xbox profile monitoring for the family, Bambu Lab 3D printer status with filament and temperature tracking, and a Bird Buddy smart bird feeder that identifies bird species. Home Assistant is the kind of platform where you keep finding new things to connect to it.
The common thread across all of this is that it’s one app, one dashboard, running locally, and I control all of it. No subscriptions required for the core functionality, no reliance on someone else’s servers, and it gets better every month with community updates. If any of this sounds interesting, the first post covers what Home Assistant is and how to get started.