Some Home Assistant projects involve building sensors or messing around with other equipment. There are other projects that don’t involve any additional hardware at all; they’re just a way to make better use of the devices you already own.
Make your smart vacuum tell you when it’s in trouble
Save your robot so it can get back to work
Smart vacuums are the perfect example of what a good smart home device should do. It takes a mundane job (vacuuming or even mopping your floors) out of your hands so that you no longer have to do it yourself. The time you would have spent vacuuming is freed up for you to do other things.
There’s a lot you can do with a robot vacuum in Home Assistant. You can have it run only when everyone has left the house so that you’re not getting in its way. You can create automations to get your vacuum to clean specific areas of your home, or to tell you when it’s time to empty it.
There is one significant issue with robot vacuums. It’s all too easy for them to get trapped by furniture, tangled up in cables, or blocked by a large item you forgot to remove from the floor. When this happens, your floors don’t get cleaned and it may be some time before you notice what’s gone wrong.
If you have a robot vacuum, it’s worth taking the time to create an automation that can alert you when your smart vacuum is in trouble. Many robot vacuum integrations can surface information such as the current status, which can include error conditions. You can set up an automation that alerts you whenever the status changes to one of these error conditions.
The type of alert you set up will depend on your needs. You might prefer a critical alert to be sent to your phone, or a spoken announcement over your smart speakers. However you set it up, the sooner you rescue your robot vacuum, the sooner it can get back to cleaning your floors.
7/10
- Dimensions
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17.7 x 14.2 x 20.9 in
- Battery Life
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7,000mAh
Narwal’s Flow 2 is a new robot vacuum that utilizes AI to clean surfaces more efficiently. It features the NarMind™ Pro Autonomous System, which takes images from the vacuum’s cameras and analyzes them to plan out a smarter way to clean. This features the FlowWash Mopping System, which continuously uses clean water to get rid of stubborn stains.
Create notifications that nag you until you get things done
Make it more annoying not to complete your tasks
My short-term memory is appalling. I can remember the entire lyrics of a TV theme tune from when I was six, but will regularly forget to drink the cup of coffee that’s literally sitting right next to me. One of my biggest frustrations is that I’ll think of something I need to do, and then two minutes later, I’ll have completely forgotten about it.
Home Assistant can help. Notifications are useful, but if a notification pops up and I don’t action it immediately, I’ll probably forget about it again within minutes. That’s why persistent, repeating notifications are worth setting up.
Nagging is often the only thing that works for me. I have an automation that uses a presence sensor to detect when I’m sitting in my office chair. After half an hour, it tells me to get up using a spoken announcement through a smart speaker.
Two minutes later, it tries again. The gap between notifications gets shorter and shorter, until it is repeatedly listing the health conditions that can be caused by being too sedentary every 30 seconds.
It gets to the point where it’s simpler to just get up and walk away from the desk for a minute or two than have to listen to the constant nagging. Which is exactly what I want it to do.
There are plenty of ways to make this work, but the native Alert integration is one of the simplest. You can easily set the interval for how often you want the alerts to recur, and the problem condition that triggers the alert, such as a window being open. The alerts will then repeat at your chosen interval until the window is shut or you manually acknowledge the alert.
Build weather-aware automations
Make your home react differently depending on the weather
As a species, we’re obsessed with the weather, even when we spend most of our time indoors. A smart home is a great way to keep track of the weather, so you can know exactly how wet you would be getting if you weren’t indoors tinkering with Home Assistant.
Sometimes, knowing the weather conditions can be genuinely useful. For example, I have an automation that alerts me when the indoor dew point is higher than the outdoor dew point. When it is, I know that I can open the windows in my home to reduce the humidity.
Some people have smart cameras set up pointing at their clotheslines. If it starts to rain, an LLM can analyze the image to determine if laundry is out and send an alert reminding you to bring it inside. You can even automate the blinds in your home to open when the sun is facing the room and it needs warming, and close when the sun has moved on to trap the heat inside.
Using the weather to inform your automations can be much more useful than just displaying the temperature on a dashboard. There’s a lot more you can do with the information than you might think.
Do more with what you’ve got in Home Assistant
Some Home Assistant projects involve messing around with sensors and other devices. However, there’s a lot you can do to improve your smart home just by adding a few automations to those you already use.
Stephan is the sports journalist for the Maple Grove Report.
