Hub 04 / Living with it
This group is about the system once it is load-bearing: what it measures, what it is allowed to decide, and how it behaves when nobody is home to correct it.
Short answer
Give every consequential routine an ordinary manual path and a visible way to cancel it. Measure before you automate — energy, climate and presence all produce confident numbers that are wrong when the underlying sensor is wrong — and keep locks, valves and heaters out of anything that guesses.
Living with it
Read in order for a complete picture, or enter at the decision in front of you.
Set up reliable power and energy sensors, configure the Energy dashboard, understand W versus kWh, and avoid misleading totals.
Read guideGet trustworthy grid data into Home Assistant, split usage across peak and off-peak tariffs, and shift loads without inventing numbers you cannot verify.
Read guideSplit electricity use into peak and off-peak with utility_meter, calculate the real period cost including standing charges, and see what shifting load is actually worth.
Read guideAutomate heating and cooling with climate states, hvac_action and preset modes, without fighting the thermostat's own schedule or overriding its safety limits.
Read guideDesign a conservative Home Assistant leak alert and optional water-valve response with manual override, state verification, escalation and safe failure tests.
Read guideBuild Home Assistant actionable notifications with unique action IDs, timeouts, authentication, confirmation, traceable events and conservative device control.
Read guideCreate a professional Home Assistant dashboard with Sections, Tile cards, focused views, conditional visibility, safe actions and a household usability test.
Read guideBuild away and vacation routines on zone triggers and a mode helper, keep lighting believable, and design what happens when presence detection is wrong.
Read guideConfigure Home Assistant Assist for local voice control, expose a minimal entity set, tune names and areas, test the pipeline and protect consequential devices.
Read guideAdd a language model as a Home Assistant conversation agent, keep sentence triggers working, and draw a boundary around what an assistant may control.
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