Home Assistant: Home Modes
Overview
A quick walk through of how I use home mode in Home Assistant. This is not a tutorial but more of guide and idea of what I use them for.
Dropdown / Input Select Helper
I use a helper with pre-defined list with the home modes in. The dropdown/input select (i will use these interchangeably) and list all modes available.
Principal
The home mode is a list of states the whole house can be in. This means there should be no ambiguous (as much as possible) where it could be in one mode or another. For example, I would not consider a sleep mode if there is no way to guarantee everyone in the home is asleep. This is why I don’t have such a mode at this time.
Mode – Guest
When there are people in the home from outside the family unit. The easiest way to entering in this mode is where you don’t want or can’t track people in the home.
Automations to turn off lights are extended because I don’t want the guest to have to use an app to turn them on. This is slowly changing as I install relays into lighting circuits.
Mode – No Children
When the kids are not home. Currently manual way of switching to this mode but in the future I can see they will integrate into the Home Assistant with better tracking.
Changes to the home this mode makes include: Stairs light remain at full brightness until later in the night. They dim after a set bed time.
Mode – Normal
The default mode for the home.
Mode – Holiday
When the home is unoccupied for a period of time. This is automated using adults in the home to track.
This mode will change things like heating schedules, hot water and electricity usage for forecasting and charging the home battery overnight.
Summary
Quite a few content creators have detailed their way of control home behaviours using states/modes. For example Technithusiast, My Smart Home, Tomas McGuinness to name a few.
