15 Home Assistant Tips You MUST Do

whenever I install a new home assistant server either for myself or for family or friends I always have a standard list of additional items that I consider to be pretty essential to the home assistant experience that I run through to get everything set up so it's running just mint and today I wanted to show you the exact steps I take so that you can do them too the first thing we're going to want to make sure and do is to configure our general settings for things like language time zone and currency these are done as part of the setup wizard but if you haphazardly click next a bunch of times then you may have missed it head over to settings system and general and do a quick review of the options you want to make sure and set the time zone to make sure your data in your history graph is correct the units of measurement and currency so sensors are displayed in your dashboard correctly and your country and language for using with voice assistance while we're in this menu that leads us on to tip number two which is to create the zones zones are going to be a key way for you to create lots of different automations based on location such as turning your lights off when you leave home or sending your significant other a notification to let them know you're on your way home from work or maybe a reminder to let you know when you get to the shops that you need to pick up some essential items daily liquid first make sure your home zone is set in the correct location by dragging the circle over your house and then you can add a new Zone by clicking in the bottom right hand corner where you can also set a bigger or smaller radius depending on the zone now whenever you have a location device like your phone assigned to your user and it enters one of these zones you can run automations based on that zone tip number three is to enable advanced mode advanced mode is going to make sure that you can see all of the options in the UI and nothing is being hidden from view click on your user profile scroll down and enable advanced mode now next time you're trying to follow a guide or install an add-on you won't be confused wondering why an option isn't showing up for you tip number four is to set a static IP address an IP address is that number that you type into your browser to access home assistance dashboard but Lewis I hear you say I don't type a number I type homeassistant.local or Jimmy's homeless assistant.com so what's the deal with that well that actually uses DNS or in the case of home assistant.local mdns which basically translates that human readable name that you just typed in into an IP address in the background that's a whole other explanation in itself and originally for this section I'd written an entire page explaining all about IP addresses and then I realize that's not what this video is about but it comes down to this if you have a key or critical device on your network such as a home assistant server then you're going to want to make sure you always know the IP address that device is using for sure by setting a static IP or creating a DHCP reservation I prefer a static IP but either is fine to set a static IP find out which IP addresses you can use by checking your router's web page looking at the DHCP range and avoiding using any number in between that range a good way to check if an IP is already in use is to Simply open a terminal and type ping plus the IP you want to use if you get a reply then try the next number up until you get no response pretty much all devices will respond to Ping so you are generally safe to use this though very very occasionally you might get one that won't once you have your IP address head over to settings system Network and then click on the ipv4 drop down change the type to static and enter the IP you just chose into the top box followed by forward slash 24. you can leave the Gateway and DNS boxes as is and then hit save you're probably going to get the message saying home assistant has disconnected but don't panic just change your URL to the correct IP to connect back up again tip number five is great for Recovery purposes should you ever need it and that is enabling SSH ssh is an extremely handy way of accessing home assistant in the event of an emergency when where you messed up and made a change and suddenly you can't access the dashboard anymore it also gives you a terminal which is sometimes needed for some more advanced things head over to settings add-ons and click the add-on store button and then search for a terminal you'll see two options show up make sure to select the advanced SSH and web terminal option and install it before starting it head over to configuration and enter a secure password into the box before hitting save then back on the main page enable start on boot Watchdog and show insidebar option before starting the add-on now if you open a terminal type SSH hash IO at followed by your IP address and hit enter you will be prompted for the password and SSH is now enabled this can really come in handy if you ever run into issues and you need a backdoor in to recover it number six is a simple one often overlooked and that's to enable two-factor authentication 2fa is a really important extra layer of security to protect your server that makes it much harder for someone to gain access without your say so and causes really very minimal impact to you to enable 2fa simply head over to your user profile scroll down to the multi-factor section and hit enable next use your phone with a totp based authenticator app like Google Authenticator to scan the QR code provided and then when it gives you a six digit code enter that code into the box and hit submit now when you log in next you'll be prompted for this code but once you are signed in on all of your devices you generally don't need to log in again but this does prevent any new devices from signing in without that code remember to repeat enabling 2fa for any user accounts you have to keep them all protected now that your user accounts have been secured number seven is to install apps one of the great things about home system is that you can get access to it on pretty much any device with the official apps for IOS and Android that gets you access to additional features such as GPS location tracking can even read sensors directly from your phone to give even more automation capabilities and allows you to access your home assistant dashboard on the go as for the Windows site no official app just yet unless you go through the Android subsystem route but there is the excellent Community made Haas agent which gives you lots of sensor information and control over your Windows PC and on the Mac OS side there is once again the official app you can install to unlock Extra automation capabilities number eight is to back up back up back up backups is really important to get you out of trouble if you make a mistake or something goes wrong software or Hardware wise and home assistant backups work really well and allows you to restore everything to original or new Hardware in a matter of minutes this is quite a large topic but I would suggest automating and keeping two copies of your backups on hand in fact I recently made a whole video walking you through how to achieve just that which I'll link down below but the important thing is to get those backups automated on a daily basis number nine is to install a file editor sometimes in home assistant you will need to add an integration through a configuration file or maybe you'll want to create some template sensors when you start getting a bit more advanced meaning you'll need to access configuration files and using the visual studio code add-on is the easiest and best way to do that head over to settings add-ons add-on Store and install the vs code add-on you'll probably want to enable start on boot Watchdog and show inside bar options and hit start then you can open up the editor and get access to any files you need including the main configuration file automations scripts and secrets and what's really cool in vs code is that it's context aware meaning that has knowledge of Home assistant configuration and how it works to help you out when you're making changes number 10 is to create areas areas are exactly as they sound they Define an area or a room in your house and allow you to group your smart home devices and sensors by the area they live in this is often a feature that many people Overlook because they think it's not useful only to regret it later down the line when they realize they have hundreds of devices they haven't assigned to an area and they've got to work through them all areas come into their own for quickly targeting devices in an automation for example if you want to turn off all lights in the kitchen you can Target the kitchen area which will control all of those lights inside of it rather than having to add each light individually they have also become really important recently for using with your voice if you don't assign devices to the correct areas then you'll miss out on some really useful voice commands areas can be created by going to settings areas and adding a new area and then when you add a new device through an integration you'll be prompted to assign it to an area or if you have an existing device you haven't yet assigned to an area you can do that inside of the settings number 11 is adding media storage from a Nas this serves two purposes firstly it lets you playback media you may have from anas on your speakers or media players and secondly it's great if you decide to use something like frigate it means that your recordings can be offloaded to your Nas and it won't be stored on home assistance main drive and risk running it out of space to add media storage head over to settings system storage and click add network storage fill in the details for your Nas selecting either sifts or NFS as the share type add-in credentials if required then when you head over to the media folder in the sidebar you will have access to everything stored on your Nas number 12 is hacks no not that kind of hacks the home assistant community store it kind of hacks hacks is where you can go to install hundreds of extra Integrations that are not officially made or supported but are kindly submitted by users of the community to add even more functionality to home assistant by either supporting more devices or adding themes or dashboard customization hacks makes it extremely easy to search install and keep Community made Integrations updated so much so that I think it's definitely an essential item to have it if you haven't already installed installing hacks is really easy all you need to do is head over to the hacks install website which will walk you through it step by step and it also uses the SSH and terminal add-on which we installed previously so you should be good to go there once installed you'll have access to hundreds of new Integrations themes and dashboard cards now that you have hacks installed number 13 is the next one to tackle installing Watchman Watchman is an excellent integration available through hacks that will check for issues within your home assistant environment maybe you have an automation that still references a device that you deleted or maybe you have a script that has an entity in it that has its name changed Watchman can help you identify these issues that can potentially cause slowdowns or things not to run as expected Watchman is super useful for keeping an eye on things and I've done a full video setting up Watchman which I'll link down below number 14 is to set up some sort of remote access and like many things in home assistant there is several ways to do this depending on your level of experience how much work you're willing to put in and your budget the easiest and most recommended way is of course to use nabucasa which is provided directly from the home assistant team themselves costs a small amount per month and gives you several features such as secure remote access that can be set up in like less than two minutes access to Advanced voice features and easy linking to Amazon and Google home and of course it directly supports the home assistant developers so that they can keep making and providing home assistant for free to everyone if that's a little outside of your monthly budget or maybe you fancy a challenge you can go down setting up your own VPN with wireguard or tail skill route or you can go down the cloudflare tunnel route all of these are more involved than setting up Nabi Casa but I have covered all of these in the past with a step-by-step guides which you can check out with the link in the description and finally we come to number 15. this one is admittedly an optional one but I do recommend it if you can and that is the enable analytics by default home assistant doesn't collect or store any analytics unless you opt in during setup or enable them after the fact meaning they are often missed by first timers but analytics are hugely important for the project as it allows them to see how many people are using certain Integrations so they know where to focus their development efforts it allows them to see which Hardware configurations are most popular and used to provide the best support and it lets them see which versions people are using so as to better inform breaking changes and so much more analytics can be enabled under settings system analytics and the team are very transparent about what is collected and how data is processed you can even view all of the stats at any time on analytics.homeassistant.io and you can toggle them on or off at any time analytics is a great way to support the project if you are comfortable with doing so and it doesn't cost an anything that is my 15 things to do after you get home assistant installed let me know down in the comments if you have any further suggestions to add to the list I'm sure you all have great ones as always if you're new to home assistant hopefully you found this video useful and you've got a bunch of new features that you've enabled and turned on and even if you've been using home assistant for a while or years now maybe there was at least one or two features that you didn't know about that you now do I hope you enjoyed this video please make sure to drop this video a like and get subscribed and I will see you in the next video

Channel: Everything Smart Home

Views: 88,778

Keywords: home assistant, smart home, home automation, home assistant tips, home assistant tricks, home assistant tips and tricks, home assistant setup, home assistant guide, home assistant first steps, home assistant 2fa, home assistant ssh, home assistant addons

Id: FVusYP4fHFM

Length: 14min 28sec (868 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 21 2023