5 MORE Home Assistant Beginner Mistakes to AVOID!

you guys seem to really love the previous video where we looked at five beginner mistakes when it comes to home assistant and lots of you were really interested in seeing a part two of that video and what can i say i am a man of the people and so that is what we're going to be looking at today covering five more beginner home assistant mistakes that i see all of the time whether it's mistakes i've made personally or ones that i see others making on the various support channels and if you haven't seen that first video yet then do make sure to check that one out also and let's just get into it so jumping right in with mistake number one and that is not using a naming scheme and in particular not using a naming scheme when you first get started when you first start out with home assistant you may not have that many devices and so naming your devices isn't something that you've probably given that much thought to so you just go with something like living room light or light one or you may even stick with the default naming of the device but trust me once you start to gather more and more devices you will want to have a more useful naming scheme in place otherwise things can get really confusing very quickly and suddenly you won't know if living room light is the main light or that lamp in the corner over there or that other lamp over there or what the heck is going on and it's not just devices that this applies to but everything so automations scripts entities scenes anything that you can give a name to then this advice applies because coming back and changing things after the fact can be a nightmare and you'll have to rename everything that references the original name in all of your scripts and automations so save yourself them some time and get a good solid foundation down right out of the gate i'm probably about to single-handedly attack everyone here including myself but mistake number two is to stop over complicating things we all know how powerful home assistant is and how really any automation that you can think of doing can probably be done but sometimes because there are so many ways to do things and because it is so powerful this can almost trick us into thinking that everything we are doing needs to be this really big long complicated automation with dozens of triggers conditions choices action upon action and sometimes you just need to take a step back breathe and it will hit you that there is a much simpler and easier way of achieving the exact same result it's funny i actually had a really good chat with home assistant developer and legend frank just recently and we were talking about this exact same thing saying that we both are guilty of over complicating or trying to overcomplicate our automations so trust me you are definitely not alone we all do it but sometimes things don't need to be complicated and it pays to just keep things simple you know in fact let me know in the comments down below if you know exactly what i am talking about if you are guilty of over complicating things let me know down below i'd be really interested to see if that is something that you can relate to i know i definitely can plus it helps me out you know the third mistake is a simple one to fix and that is not enabling two-factor authentication and in my opinion there really is no excuse to not have this enabled it can be done in just a matter of seconds and it should provide you with a big improvement in security for those of you who have your home assistant available outside of your house and you won't even really notice it's there because once you have logged into home assistant for the first time you'll never have to deal with it again since home assistant keeps you signed in the only reason you could have for not enabling this is if you don't have home assistant available externally or you use a vpn to access your instance but even then i do think it's still worth turning on given how little time it takes and how much it will improve your security if you want to know how to enable two-factor authentication then i take you through the entire process in the essential tips for security video which you can check out up here and that's also a great video if you want to learn more about securing your home assistant mistake number four is one that some of you may not agree with and that's okay and that is leaving too long between updates and i know that may have triggered some of you but hear me out i think home assistant is much more stable and reliable now when it comes to updates and if you do your due diligence of reading the breaking changes before upgrading like we discussed in the previous video and you maybe even wait for a couple of days or a week after the latest release then you will more than likely be absolutely fine to update the reason i think leaving too long between updates is a mistake is because you just end up having to read through months and months of breaking changes and release notes and the likelihood of missing something there is quite high i'm not saying you have to update every single month if you don't want to but even something like every second month or something like that would be a much better strategy than say six seven eight months or even more i do think that for 99 of people it's probably more than safe enough for you to update every month if you want to plus if you have your backups as we spoke about in the previous video then you can always roll back you do have your backups right the fifth and final mistake is a simple one and that is not keeping an eye on the logs and not just when something goes wrong but occasionally taking a peek in there from time to time the logs can often provide a lot more information that you may otherwise be unaware of such as integrations not working properly or automations and scripts not configured correctly or other errors that may stop home assistant working properly or even potentially slowing things down the first logs you can check for are the obvious ones under configuration and then logs but if you are using home assistant os or supervised then you can also access some other logs under supervisor system and then logs and this is where you may find errors relating to supervisors such as add-ons or snapshots and it's worth just having a quick look in here from time to time just to make sure everything is working properly and these logs will also be really useful for if you are asking for help on discord or in the forums so it's good to know where those logs are and that is it that is five more home assistant mistakes that i see all the time but i'm curious let me know in the comments what is the biggest mistake that you've made so far on your home automation journey these are ones i often see when helping people but perhaps you have some others i haven't yet thought of yet so drop them in the comments down below i actually loved reading all of the responses on the previous video and it's good to learn from mistakes right but that's about going to do it for this video if you want to support the channel you could do so by becoming a patron on patreon and your sport allows me to keep on making these videos thank you to all my current patreon supporters as always your support is massively appreciated 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: 39,004

Keywords: home assistant, smart home, home automation, home assistant setup, home assistant guide, home assistant mistakes, home assistant getting started, home assistant best practices, home assistant hardware, home assistant backups, home assistant how to, smart home mistakes, home assistant complex, home assistant automations, home assistant naming scheme, home assistant naming, home assistant 2 factor authentication, home assistant 2fa

Id: Aq7F_iJsreM

Length: 7min 16sec (436 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 17 2021