We have a ZzZ script which slowly turns off the TV and lights.
It works from one end of the house through the kitchen, then lounge, then up the stairs, the idea is it follows me to bed turning off things as I’m walking…
A separate script tells me that it’s time for bed (as I find finishing the day difficult).
Not as fancy but an hour before my bed time my small stained glass lamp turns on as a reminder I have an hour left. 5 minutes before bed my phone goes into night mode. At bed time all the lights in my room shut off. It’s been way more effective than my ADHD ass having no idea what time it is and staying up super late.
Laziest eh? Probably the one that deletes completed items from my shopping list when I leave the supermarket, because I got sick of doing it manually.
Most ridiculous would be the NFC tag I have on the lid of my cold brew coffee jug. I make a batch so rarely that I can never remember how much coffee to add, so scanning the tag makes my Google Home say; “You want 80g of coffee per litre, or 6 scoops.”
That’s a good idea I’m gonna steal it. You should make a blueprint.
I have an announcement play every 30 minutes to yell at me in a harsh voice “Drink Water God Damn It!” I forget to hydrate a lot. I’ve tried many other reminders, but none of them worked well. Turns out I just need someone to yell at me.
My son also has ADHD and my wife and I are that voice for him. I’m not sure where he gets it from. On an unrelated note, the days where I forget to eat are my most productive, so it’s a good thing you don’t need an 'eat God damn it" reminder.
I started drinking more water when I got a sport bottle with one of them built-in sipping straws. It’s just near me most of the time, so I take some sips just to occupy myself for a few seconds.
Previously I drank a lot of tea, wherein the sign that I need to get more tea was when the cup was empty. But I’m off caffeine now.
I made an automated sandwich maker. The automation turns it on, sets a timer, shows the timer on tv, turns it off when the timer goes off, pauses the tv and turns lights in kitchen on, if after sunset. Ridiculous? Jup. But also super cool.
I have 4 lights in my room that I use for different things. Ceiling light, light above my bed, lights hanging from the high part of the vaulted ceiling (these are yellow glass really pretty but kinda dim great for before bed) and a small stained glass lamp.
I have an automation to turn on the small stained glass lamp at 7 because that’s when I should be getting ready to get in bed, wind down, read a book, something like that. At 825 my phone goes into sleep mode, night light and night mode activated. At 830 all the lights in my room turn off and my fan turns on.
At 330am my alarm goes off and the stained glass lamp turns on and the fan turns off. It’s dim enough to not be blinding but bright enough I won’t just turn my alarm off. At 340 the yellow lights come on to make sure my ass gets up. As I’m walking out of my room, I can double tap the light switch down and it will turn off all 4 lights and the fan if any of the above are on.
I also have a button hanging by a command strip on my night stand that can control everything for when I’m too lazy to open the app on my phone 😂
Turn the lights on and off in the basement. The kids kept playing with the lights and arguing over it, so I automated the whole floor and blocked the switches off.
Arguments immediately stopped.
Thought of another one…
I bought some TP-Link wifi bulbs that were flaky from the start. After some investigation I discovered that these particular bulbs felt it important to phone home to China every few seconds and became very, very unhappy if the lines were down. After a short tantrum they would reset their wifi connection before regaining consciousness. What that meant in my 3 bulb fixture was that when my “lights off” scene was triggered and my firewall was blocking their corporate masters, one or more of the bulbs was often in a stupor and would remain on indefinitely.
Did I just go spend $25 on some new, decent bulbs that actually worked? Nope - no way some stinking TP-Link bulbs were going to win! Instead I spent hours creating multiple redundant automations that checked for each possible failure state, kept polling the bulbs until their tantrum ended and they regained consciousness, and then turned off whatever bulbs were left on.
Every time I turned off the lights I was able to declare victory. After I felt they had learned their lesson I bought some Zigbee bulbs that actually work.
This is some shit I would do. Fuck you and your not working, I’ll show you who’s boss!
You’re my spirit animal.
I click a button when taking my pill so I don’t take it twice by mistake, it also alerts me if I’ve forgotten my dose. Not really ridiculous, but I wanted to feel included lol
I have had complex med schedules for an epileptic cat monitored by HA
Do you have it set to tell you after x amount of pills to pickup new ones and/or see your doc for refills?
frog I can’t even remember to get my meds renewed let alone take them half the time. 30 days of pills last me upwards of 3 months before I get a new bottle. no wonder I’m so messed up
MedTimer (FOSS) and a 7-day pill organizer changed my life.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve had to upgrade to one with AM/PM distinctions to balance the uppers and downers.
Also, you have ADHD. Talk to somebody about it.
That’s genuinely useful.
I need this. Can you share?
this isn’t bad!!!1one
Not sure this belongs, but my most proud automation is an automatic water bowl for my dogs. It automatically drains, rinses, and fills 16 times per day so they always have fresh water. They deserve a better life than my lazy ass can give them.
:O it’s hooked to the tap and a drain I assume? How big is that?
Correct! It connects to a sink drain the same way a dishwasher does. It is actually a bathroom sink, the kind that sits on top of the counter. We have had three Great Danes at one time so trying to keep up with a clean water dish was really impossible. We no longer have large dogs but the desire to keep them in clean water persists.
Super cool. I’ll have to keep that in mind for behind my kitchen wall 🤔
I’ve got a led strip on my toilet door. It turns red when someone is inside (mesured by the wasp in a box principle.
I’m unfamiliar with the wasp in a box principle. Is that the one where you keep a box of live wasps in the bathroom and determine if someone is in there based on how recently you’ve heard a scream?
Where do you guys find power outlets for all these weird placements of LED strips? :D Outlets in my house is not in great places for something like this.
I lucked out and was simply in a relationship with a gal whom I helped purchase a house with a handy switched power outlet near the ceiling which was likely intended for seasonal decorative lights.
I co-oped the outlet once we got married but I need to replace the piece of tape that keeps the light in with one of these multi-button zigbee mains-powered switches that fit in multi-gang decora plates. I refuse to do wifi unless I can run esphome on it, and I will only trust matter when it runs over thread.I know there are some zwave rechargeable LED strips but they’re pricey
Suggestion for enhancement: Have the LEDs start out yellow and after a couple of minutes turn them red because entry has likely become hazardous.
Or put a mic in the bathroom and make the LEDs yellow for pee sounds and red for fart sounds.
I’m kidding but I actually think this would be fun, but you’d need a way to differentiate sounds.
You should set up a speaker in your toilet and start to fade in orchestral music when the occupancy time is getting too long.
My dishwasher automatically selects it’s Eco program when powered on. The Eco program uses more water and more energy than the Auto program while also taking almost twice as long. So I have an automation that triggers when my dishwasher is powered on and then selects the Auto program for me - because pressing a button to change the program after loading the dishwasher would be too much to ask.
If it uses more water and more energy, what exactly is “eco” about it?
@pfr @homeassistant just remember that this machine needs to clean it’s pipes too, just using chemicals for that won’t do very well i guess. I’m not saying that this is logical (making this eco mode) but using more electricity for hot water and using more water (for not reusing too much water all over again) is probably the sweet spot for lasting much longer. Which in turn is not in the interest of the company selling these machines. I guess.
Thanks for that. Now I need a new dishwasher.
@EarMaster
Sensing some confusion out there.
ECO mode, exactly as the name implies, uses less water and less energy.@EarMaster
Under some specific circumstances AUTO might be more economic but that would be the exception rather than a rule.It is for me. The user manual states how much water and energy is used for each program. For the Auto program a range is given. The water consumption of the Eco program is almost identical to the worst value of the Auto program. I can measure the power consumption using a smart plug and I know that - at least for my dishes - the Auto program uses less energy than the Eco program.
How did you measure the water going through? Did you hook up an in-line flow meter to the dishwasher? I would be interested to know if my Bosch dishwasher is the same way because I always use Eco.
I can only measure the electricity directly. For the water consumption I rely on the values provided by the user manual.
I am well aware that Eco is supposed to be - well - more economic and maybe eco-friendly, but everything I read and could measure about my specific model indicate the opposite.
@JustEnoughDucks @EarMaster I’m not the original poster. I have seen lab test results supporting the LOWER water usage claim in ECO for common devices.
According to my own monitoring via smartplug, my own dishwasher uses about a 20 to 30% less electrical energy when in ECO mode as opposed to AUTO mode. It is a Bauknecht, which is likely very similar to your Bosch device in many ways (Bosch, Siemens, Bauknecht household devices all being manufactured by the same company…).
I have alerts that push out when the fridge door is open.
And another that flashes all the lights in the house when the doorbell rings.I replaced my fridge light with an RGB zwave light and door sensor. This concept has been solved for decades and my solution is worse. But it also turns green…
I got a new fridge last year and the whole back of it (behind the shelves) is lit evenly, I guess with LEDs. Far nicer than a bulb.
Oh that’s interesting! What bulb did you use?
Mostly the ones that send a post from one social media app to another.
44 automations + 27 scripts and counting, not sure any of them are totally over the top but theres at least 2 dedicated buttons in my house for when the dog needs to take a shit in the middle of the night to turn on specific lights for a short time for him.
Unfortunately I haven’t taught him to use them on his own.
44 automations? HA!
I have a small home and currently have over 200 automations. Maybe I need to find other hobbies.
600+ automations, 500+ scripts :( My house runs itself, and has its own moods. If it’s in a goth persona and feeling miserable (which it usually is when in a goth persona), it’ll change some of the light colors to apocalypse of blood.
Oh hell yeah, I’d love to do that but my wife doesn’t like when I do mood lighting
You win, but you definitely need to find other hobbies.
Yet.
Curious as to what you’re using scripts for? I have 88 automations and have so far found no need for a single script and I feel like I’m missing a trick somewhere.
Yes, I do have some automations that share functionality but it’s one or two actions and it seems redundant to call a separate script.
Scripts are used for a lot of things! Generally any time I want to do the same thing under multiple automations, I use a script as the middleman.
For example, I built a script for turning off all of my lights each night but it has to be fed a time scaling variable to determine specifically how quickly to turn them off (sometimes I want them turned off quickly vs slowly). Automations trigger said script with the right scale factor.
I have air purifiers that I ramp up and down conditionally, they don’t have a built in ramping function so I built a script to ramp them to a target % in their allowed 10% increments, over a variable time period. This can be then be called in one line from any automation or script.
When I’m turning off lights each night, I want them to ramp down to a specific level/color/temperature before turning off but only if they are currently on. Rather than build an if statement for every light, a script takes a input list of lights and runs through each one to determine whether or not to ramp.
Finally, my Google Home device is able to call scripts directly, (“hey Google, activate Cozy Time” triggers the “Cozy Time” script) so some things I use Google Assistant to trigger use scripts directly since that was at least easier at the time than using an automation. If I automate the same thing (e.g., a “Cozy Time” button above), I can just call the script from the automation in one line, easy peasy.
Thank you, that’s food for thought at least.
Can I ask about your light script? I have a bunch of smart bulbs that either don’t support or don’t expose the ‘power-on behaviour’ option, so in a power cut they come on full bright when power is restored, often in the middle of the night.
My HA is on a UPS so I’ve been trying to have it store the states of lights when the UPS switches to battery power (before they go to unavailable) and then restore those states when power comes back, but it’s apparently way beyond my skill set. Curious as to how your “input list of lights” works and whether it could help me…
Here is the full script in case it’s helpful. took a hot second of searching to set everything up, but now it’s really easy to use. When you call the script inside an automation it has input fields just like if you’re calling a built-in function like
light.turn_onFor your specific use case though, it may be easier to just take advantage of the built-in Scenes function. You can use an “entity snapshot” with “Scene: Create” a scene of the current state of your “bad” lights when the power goes out, then “Activate” that scene, perhaps with a couple of seconds transition time to smooth things out as soon as power is restored.
I use a similar scene based function to create flashing colored light alerts based on certain conditions.
sequence: - repeat: for_each: "{{ lights }}" sequence: - variables: light_state: "{{states(repeat.item)}}" timescale: "{{states('input_number.timescale')}}" - if: - condition: template value_template: "{{light_state == 'on'}}" then: - metadata: {} data: brightness_pct: "{{target_brightness}}" transition: "{{transition_rate * timescale}}" kelvin: "{{color_temperature}}" target: entity_id: "{{repeat.item}}" action: light.turn_on fields: lights: selector: entity: multiple: true filter: - domain: light name: Light(s) required: true target_brightness: selector: number: min: 1 max: 100 name: Target brightness (%) default: 1 required: true color_temperature: selector: color_temp: unit: kelvin min: 1500 max: 7000 name: Color temperature required: true default: 2200 transition_rate: selector: number: min: 1 max: 600 name: Transition rate description: Transition rate, scaled by 'input_number.timescale' required: true default: 100 description: Dims the target light(s) if they are on - Kelvin setpoint. icon: mdi:lightbulb-auto-outline mode: parallel max: 15
