Ultimate Home Assistant Beginner’s Guide!

Home Assistant is the most powerful smart home system available, and with great power comes... a very long video explaining how to use it. Don't be overwhelmed by the length though. It's one big video instead of a series so you can jump around to different sections or bookmark it and easily come back to it. But don't worry, I'm going to keep it extremely simple so it's easy to understand. That means no writing code, covering advanced topics. All of that will be in a separate advanced video. So for this video, I'm starting with a brand new install of Home Assistant, and we'll build it out with you. By the end, you'll be up and running with Home Assistant and it won't scare you anymore. It might even be easy. And it's never been easier to start with Home Assistant, since you can buy an off-the-shelf device like Home Assistant Green, and it has everything already installed. You can even buy Home Assistant Green on Amazon now. I'll put the link down below. That's what I'm going to be using in this video, but Home Assistant is free and open source so you can install it on a variety of hardware. Like an old computer, NAS, Raspberry Pi, and there's some really good tutorials online on how to do that, and I'll link some down below. But I'm not going to cover that in this video, so I can focus on covering everything else. Alright, I plugged the Home Assistant Green into the wall using the included power supply and ethernet cable to the router. Then I opened up a browser on my computer to the IP address, followed by colon 8123. After a few minutes of it initializing, I created a user account, and then it found a bunch of devices already in my home. These are Wi-Fi devices like my ecobee thermostat, or devices connected by ethernet like my Apple TV. I love that Home Assistant does this, and it's not just a one-time thing. Yes, it does it when it first starts up, but as you add more smart home devices in the future, Home Assistant will recognize those and prompt you to add them, which makes it so easy. Maybe Home Assistant isn't so bad after all. Now that Home Assistant is up and running, let me show you around, because it can be a little overwhelming since we're greeted with options like developer tools, history, and logbook. But where do I add devices and create automations? Okay, maybe Home Assistant isn't super easy. Just forget everything I just said. Nah, I'm kidding. It's not that bad. Let me show you where everything is. This main view is the dashboard. It's where I can quickly view and control smart devices around my house. As you can see, some devices were automatically added. I'll show you in a minute how to customize this dashboard. Each device usually has some basic control on the dashboard, like being able to turn it on and off. But if I click on the device, more controls are available. So I can change the color of a light, for example. Okay, enough of that. Let me keep showing you around. Let's check out the settings. You might think, oh, this is an easy one. I see the settings button. Bless your heart for thinking it would be that straightforward. Go ahead, click on it. See if you can do things like log out of the app. Nope, you won't find it there. There's actually a kind of hidden settings that's not so obvious. It can easily be missed because it doesn't look like something you can click on. In the very bottom corner, there's a button with my name. If I click on that, it will open up the profile settings page. These are mainly the settings for the current phone, tablet, or computer that I'm using to view Home Assistant. So this is where I can log out or scroll down and make changes, like what is shown on the sidebar, colors, themes, and that kind of stuff. Just be aware, changing this only changes it for the current device. So if I have the Home Assistant app on my phone and I remove certain sidebar items, that will not affect the Home Assistant app on my iPad. And we'll get into why that's helpful and important later in the video. Okay, now that we've gotten that out of the way, let's click on the button in the sidebar that says settings. This button should really be called everything because it's where we can basically find everything including adding devices, automations, and scenes. Why on earth they bury everything in here is a mystery. So in here, there's a section called automation and scenes where I can create and manage my automations that we'll go over in just a bit. To add smart home devices, I go to devices and services. And the first page is called integrations. Just like other smart home platforms, if I want to add my Philips Hue lights, I just add the Philips Hue integration and it pulls in all my Hue lights. Since I already have some Hue lights in my house, Home Assistant has discovered the Hue bridge on my network and gave me a button to add it to Home Assistant. I know the button says configure but translated into normal people language, it would be called add. Then once it's configured or added, the integration shows up at the bottom. And Home Assistant added a handful of these by itself during setup as I mentioned earlier. But let's add some more. I'll start off first by adding a LIFX smart light since these devices were discovered by Home Assistant. And all I have to do is click configure. That's it. The light has been added to Home Assistant. And I didn't need to add my LIFX login because it's just connecting with the light locally. Pretty sweet, right? And after adding it, there's a little drop down for which area of the house this should go to. You could organize your house this way and it might work really well. Personally, I don't use this feature. I used to but then it became so much work to upkeep because sometimes I start off with a device in a room and then down the road it moves to another room and I forget to update it. So what's worked better for me is how I name devices. Let me show you as I integrate my Philips Hue devices. Instead of giving all the devices a specific area, I just try to name them where it is in the house. So it would be Hue Light and then the room it's in, Bedroom. And there are actually two Hue Lights in the bedroom. And this one is on my side of the bed. So the name would be Hue Light Bedroom Read. It's not a flashy name but it's really easy to find when I'm searching for it on Home Assistant, which I do all the time when creating automations, scenes, and all that stuff. And I wish I would have named my devices like this from the start. All right, at the top is the integration page which we just went over. Then there are devices and entities. This can get a little confusing because they are similar. So let me show you an example and it should make sense what the difference is. On the devices tab, there is a Philips Hue motion sensor. Think of a device in Home Assistant as the physical object as a whole. Like this motion sensor. I can hold this entire device in my hand. But when I click on the motion sensor, there are three sensors I can access inside the device. One to detect light, motion, and temperature. These sensors are called entities. There are a few other entities in this motion sensor like the battery level and a few other switches. And what's cool is that Home Assistant automatically records all the data for each of those sensors or entities and I can view them in a graph or use them for automations. So if you're a data nerd like me, this is the best thing ever to track everything so precisely around the house. But I know someone right now is typing in a comment, I don't want a company tracking all that data on me, the NSA, blah, blah, blah. Look, with Home Assistant, that is not an issue. Everything is stored locally in your house and no one has access to it. That's a big reason why people love Home Assistant so much. Okay, we've covered the first three pages in this section. Now to the last one called helpers. What are helpers, you might wonder? Well, they're fake devices I can add to my smart home because real smart home devices are just too dang expensive. Okay, that's not why they're used. They're virtual devices and they're extremely useful. Here are a couple of ways I'm using them. When a babysitter is watching our kids here at our house, I have a virtual switch I turn on that will skip certain automations while Ali and I are away. To do this, I create a helper and choose toggle. Give it a name and an icon, and now there's a switch created that I can turn on or off. Later when I'm making an automation, I'm going to come back to this switch. But there's another really useful helper that you should know about, and that's a group. The name is kind of self-explanatory, but it groups together multiple devices, or I should say entities, into a new entity so they can be controlled and monitored as a whole. Here's an example. I'll create one for the three smart bulbs and my pendant lights in the kitchen. As you can see, there are a bunch of groups to choose from, but I'm going to select light. I'll add the three lights, and once it's created, I can control all three lights from one spot. This is super useful and can save so much time when creating automations and just controlling the lights from the dashboard. There are lots of really good helpers available, and in the advanced home assistant video, I'll go over more of them, like the template sensor. It's amazing. But we're just scratching the surface on adding devices into Home Assistant, and next I'm going to plug in a few USB sticks to add even more smart home devices. And don't worry, it's not as scary as it sounds. We got this. You might have heard of Zigbee, Z-Wave, and Thread. These are protocols that smart home devices use to communicate. For example, this motion sensor. It uses Zigbee. So when it detects motion, it sends a little message to the Zigbee radio That way it can trigger an automation and turn on the lights. Most sensors use Zigbee, Z-Wave, or Thread because they are low power and don't chew through batteries as fast as a Wi-Fi sensor would. They can also build out a mesh network so it can reach across my entire house. Okay, so which one should you choose? Ultimately, it will come down to what you need, but let me share with you what I mainly use. I have the most Zigbee devices around my house because they're the least expensive and the most popular. I also have a good number of Z-Wave devices, and I have the fewest number of Thread devices. If you go all in on one protocol, like if everything uses Zigbee, then it will create a stronger mesh network between those devices. But you can use all three, Zigbee, Z-Wave, and Thread simultaneously. And I actually prefer having all three. That way when I'm buying devices, I'm not limiting myself to a specific protocol. Alright, so how do I add Zigbee devices into Home Assistant? Well, I have two options, and the first option is something that I already showed in this video. Remember when I added Philips Hue to Home Assistant? Well, the Philips Hue lights and motion sensors use Zigbee. So by integrating the Philips Hue bridge, all those devices are connected to Home Assistant. This works locally, so it's fast and reliable. But the second option is better. Instead of using something like the Hue bridge to connect Zigbee devices, I can use a USB stick with a Zigbee radio in it and plug that directly into my Home Assistant green. This will allow Zigbee devices to connect straight into Home Assistant without needing a third-party bridge. That will make it even more reliable and be one big mesh network. Plus, they have these USB sticks for Z-Wave and Thread, so it's not just Zigbee. You can also plug them into a Raspberry Pi and it'll work just fine. There are lots of great options out there, and I'll link some down in the video description. But one thing I highly recommend is a USB extender to help reduce interference. If you buy a Home Assistant ZBT-1, it comes with a USB extender included. But I used the one I picked up on Amazon that has a separate power supply for the USB sticks. First, I'm going to add the ZBT-1. And after plugging it into the USB extender, it popped up on the integration page. I clicked on the Configure button, ahem, Add button, and selected Zigbee. Then I'm done, right? Nope. That only loaded the firmware. I have to click on Configure again. Then create a network. After that, it's finally set up. Then I see the ZHA, Z-HA, Z-H-A, which stands for Zigbee Home Automation down there at the bottom. To add the first device, I have to click on One Device. And then select Add Devices Via This Device. So let's add a Zigbee device. I'm going to add this Aqara Motion Sensor. And on Amazon, it says I need the Aqara Hub. But most Zigbee devices can connect straight to Home Assistant without needing something like the Aqara Hub. Make sure the Zigbee device is in pairing mode and is close to the USB's Zigbee stick. It should find it in a few seconds. I gave it a name, and then this screen is pretty much a dead end. So I went back and refreshed my browser window, and then the Motion Sensor popped up. Clicking on the Motion Sensor shows all the entities in the device. And if I want to add another Zigbee device, there's a button in the bottom right now that I can click on that's a little more intuitive. So there are a couple of hurdles to add Zigbee to Home Assistant initially. But once that's done, adding future Zigbee devices to Home Assistant is easy. For Z-Wave, it's similar, but there are some differences. I'm going to be using the Zeus Z-Wave 800 Series USB stick that I picked up on Amazon. And I plugged it into the USB extender that's connected to my Home Assistant green. And this time, nothing popped up on the integration page. So I had to click on the Add Integration button and select Z-Wave. It asked me if I want to use the Z-Wave JS add-on. I do, and I click on Submit. After loading for a few seconds, a screen pops up with some options. It asks for what USB device should Z-Wave use. Select the Z-Wave stick, and leave the other fields blank. After loading for about a minute, it was finished. The Z-Wave integration is down at the bottom, but to add a device is slightly different from Zigbee. Select the integration, and then select Configure. Then the button to add a device shows up in the bottom right. I added a Zeus Z-Wave Motion Sensor, and it detected it right away. There was a pin code I had to add that's located on the device and in the box it came in. And just like the Zigbee integration, once one device is added, a button shows up in the Devices section to add another one. You'd think that button would just be there from the start, but that would just make too much sense. Another way I can add Zigbee or Z-Wave devices, and I think it's the only way I can add Threadmatter devices, is by going to the Devices page and click Add Device. From there, I can click on Add a Matter Device, Z-Wave, or Zigbee device, and it just jumps to the right spot. Alright, so that was a little crash course into Zigbee and Z-Wave, and adding those into Home Assistant. So thanks for sticking with me, because now the real fun starts. Customizing the dashboard, adding automations, and all that good stuff. Since I've added more devices to Home Assistant, let's go back and check out the dashboard. To do that, I'm going to click on Overview in the sidebar. This is auto-populated from Home Assistant, and it looks like an absolute mess. There are devices all over the place, and trying to find something gives me a headache. It might seem like a good idea to use this auto-generated dashboard by Home Assistant, and I know I did when I first started, and it was terrible. Don't make the same mistake I did. We can do better than this. So I'm going to make a customized dashboard. That way I can pick and choose the devices that I want to see, and organize them in a way that makes sense. So I'm going to click on Settings, and then Dashboards. To create a new dashboard, select Add Dashboard. There are some options here, but I want a blank dashboard, so New Dashboard from Scratch. I can give it any name I want and an icon. Once I click Create, it shows up in the sidebar, but I want to replace the default dashboard. So I'm going to click on the newly created dashboard again, and select Set as Default on this device. After selecting that, the overview dashboard disappears, and the new custom dashboard is the top item in the sidebar. Click on it, and it's a blank slate. Now, it might feel daunting looking at a blank screen, but don't worry. It used to be way more difficult in the past, and it's a lot easier now. Let me show you. So it might be tempting to click on the Edit button and just start adding stuff, but what I want to do is edit the current view, or create a new view, and use the sections as the view type. This is drag and drop, and it's way better. It's still very new, so that's why it's not the default, but probably will be eventually. And I can choose how many columns I want. Three or four are pretty standard. I like to select an icon instead of a title so it's cleaner, but check out how easy it is to add things to the dashboard. If I click on the plus button, I'm given a ton of different card options. These are all the different types of cards that can be displayed on the dashboard, and I'm going to use the tile card. It's probably my favorite, since it looks really nice. I'm just going to choose the WLED lights in my studio. What's nice is I can see a preview of it right there on the side. I can click on it to view more info, and also clicking on the icon turns it on and off. If I want to change what happens when I click on it, I go to the Interactions dropdown and change it there. For example, I can have it toggle on and off when I click on the main area, so I don't have to hit that little icon. It's nice that I can customize it exactly how I like it. I can also add the brightness slider right underneath, by going to the Features and adding that. It's way faster to adjust the brightness without having to click on it first. Next, I'll add the gauge card for the motion sensor battery, but as you can see, it's really massive. Luckily, it's easy to switch it. Just click on Layout, and I can shrink down the size of the card, and now it looks much better. Now I can add pretty much whatever I want. Another tile card for the motion sensor detection? Yep, sure thing. There's also the sensor card, which is really cool because it shows kind of like a little graph. And for this, I'm going to use the light sensitivity. If I want to move things around, I can just drag and drop them, so it's super easy to rearrange stuff. And it used to be way more difficult in the past, so this is so much better now. This is just one room, so what I'm going to do is name this little section the name of the room. Then I'm going to create another section for another room. This one will be the main room of our house. I'll add the pendant lights, kitchen lights, and the TV cabinet lights. But as you can see, the TV cabinet lights have a really long device name, and I don't want to display that on the dashboard. So I can go into the appearance and just change the name to whatever makes the most sense. I'm going to change the icon to match the light strips and change the name of this section to Main Room. Then I'm going to create another section and add a history graph. This one's pretty sweet because it's a little more detailed of a graph, so I can see if the temperature is getting too high or too low at a glance. I can easily drag and drop different cards from one section to another, so it's super flexible. And I can even move around the sections. Just know that the sections will show up on the phone from left to right. So whatever's on the left should be the most important since it'll be the first thing that shows up when the Home Assistant app is opened. Now you might see that plus sign at the top. That is for badges. These are great for things that the whole house uses. For example, the sun. That way I can click on it and always see when the sun is going to be setting and rising. This is helpful to make sure automations are running when they're supposed to. Okay, so my dashboard is looking good so far, but now I want to take it up a notch. I'm also going to create another view, but this view will be a sub-view. I like sub-views because I can put a lot of devices on it that I don't need to see often. But I can still get to it quickly and then jump back to my main dashboard without cluttering up the dashboard view tabs. Let me show you how it works and it'll make more sense. So I create the sub-view and then I'll add the babysitter skip automation toggle I added earlier since it's something that I don't use on a daily basis. And as you can see, there's a little back arrow that takes me back to the main view. Again, this is because it's a sub-view, but you can see once I'm done editing it, the view is no longer visible. That way it's not cluttering up the other views, so it's pretty nice. But I need a way to get to that sub-view, so I'll make a button. I'm going to create another badge for this example, but I could add a button instead or whatever I want. I'm just going to keep it the sun for now. It doesn't really matter. I'm going to change the functionality anyways. So I'll give it another name and change the icon. And then I'll set the interaction. And this is the most important part. Clicking on the interaction, I have the option to navigate and this will allow the press of this button to open up another page. So I'll select the sub-view page I just created. All right, I'm going to click save and let's see if this button takes us to the sub-view. Yes, it does! Success! Then I can turn on that babysitter skip automation switch and click the back button and I'm back to the main dashboard. I'm also going to delete the default home view page because I'm not going to use that one since I have the custom view that I already made. If I want to create another view, it doesn't have to be a sub-view. This could be something like a bunch of outdoor devices, like a lot of cameras that take up a whole view by themselves. Then I can just select it right there from the top. So one dashboard can have multiple views. And of course, I can create multiple dashboards. So if I want to create another one, say for a mounted wall tablet, I would create a completely separate dashboard. Remember when we talked about the settings for the device that Home Assistant is being used on? Well, this is where that comes into play because I can select the default dashboard for that specific device. So when Home Assistant is opened up, it's the first dashboard that loads. I can even hide that dashboard from other devices so it's not cluttering up the side view. And if you love smart home dashboards, well, I'm planning on a more in-depth video about customizing the dashboard, showing how I set up everything for my own home. So hit that subscribe button if you haven't already. Okay, let's move on to automations. And this is where the magic really happens because your smart home can do things without you lifting a finger. And I'm going to set up an automation and show you how powerful Home Assistant is. All right, I'm going to create an automation by going to settings and then clicking on automations and scenes. And then down at the bottom, create automation. There are a few options right here. There are blueprints, which we'll cover in a minute, but I'm going to choose create new automation. Every automation will be divided into these three sections. The first one is what triggers the automation to start. So I'm going to begin with that and select a device. I'm going to choose the Aqara motion sensor we added earlier. More specifically, when it starts detecting motion, since I can trigger the automation from its different entities. Now I need it to do something. So I'm going to select add action and then choose light turn on. That way it can turn on the WLED lights or motion. There are a lot of options like change the brightness, the color, the color temperature, the transition, so it slowly turns on. Lots of different options. But for now, I just want it to turn on. So I'm going to select save and give it a name. Giving it a name is important because I can have a lot of automations and I want to quickly find it when searching. I like to start off with the name of the room, the device that's being used and kind of what it's doing. That way, if I'm searching for it, I'll usually search for one of those things and find it quickly. But I'm not done with the automation. I like to save often so I don't lose my progress. I'm going to select add conditions and these are what stop the automation from running. For example, I don't want the lights to turn on during the day. So I'm going to select time and choose after 6 p.m. and before 6 a.m. So anytime before 6 p.m. and 6 a.m., this automation will run. Else, it'll keep the lights off. All right, so let's test this condition by selecting the three dots and choosing test. Then I can see if the condition would pass or fail. It's not after 6 p.m. right now, so it fails. I'm just going to change it for this example to be after 1 p.m. and once I click test again, it does pass. So I'm going to add another condition and this will be for the babysitter mode I created earlier. So I'm going to choose entity and state. Now I'm going to select that babysitter skip automation input boolean and if the state is off. That way this automation will be skipped if the babysitter skip automation virtual switch is turned on. Then I'll click save again. Now I'm going to walk in front of the motion sensor and you'll see at the top a notification banner shows up since the automation has been triggered. This is super helpful when testing out automations to make sure that they're working correctly. Obviously for this example, I could just see if the light turned on but sometimes I need more info. For that, I click on traces. Over on the left, you can see that there's a little orange line going all the way down and that shows that it passed the two conditions and ran the action. Now let's see what happens if the babysitter skip automations is turned on and there is motion triggered. I'm going to turn on the babysitter skip automation virtual switch and walk in front of the motion sensor. I can see that the automation has been triggered again and that the light was not turned on. If I go to the traces this time, the line stops at the second condition and goes to the little X. If I click on the AV circle, it shows why the condition failed. It wanted it to be off but the switch was turned on and that's why the automation stopped running. I love this and use it all the time and it can be invaluable when trying to figure out why an automation ran or did not run. And what's really cool is if I want to see what's been controlling the WLED light, I can click on the device and choose a little graph button. Here it shows the logbook of when the device was turned on or off and I can see that the automation turned on these lights. This is super helpful when trying to figure out why a light was turned on or off when you didn't expect it to. You can just go in here, look and see exactly what's happening. That's why I love Home Assistant and nice job learning how to set up automations. There are obviously a lot more triggers and actions that you can run but I'm going to save that for a more advanced video when you're ready. Moving on to scenes which is the next tab over. And as you can see I have a bunch of auto-generated scenes that are pulled in from Hue I think. I cannot edit them since these are created outside of Home Assistant. So I'm going to create a new scene by clicking add scene and then I'm going to give it a name. Almost always scenes for me have to do with lights so I'm going to choose two different lights in this room and I'm going to change the brightness for the bat signal light to be very bright. Once I click save the scene will be able to be used in automations or on a dashboard. And say I want to create another scene that's very similar I can just go up and select duplicate scene. Maybe I want to make a less bright version. All I have to do is turn down the brightness, change the name and save it. As you can see scenes are pretty straightforward and there might be other ways to use scenes but I only use them for lights for how convenient they are. For everything else I use automations and scripts. You might be wondering what the difference is between automations and scripts. Home Assistant says a script is a sequence of actions that can be run from a dashboard and automation or be triggered by voice. So they're very similar to automations but it's just the action part. There's no trigger and they're essential in my smart home. It'll make more sense once you see how I'm using it. I have a script that I'm using on my main smart home instance with a few actions that skip commercials on my Apple TV remote. The reason this is a script and not an automation is because there are multiple ways I can run these actions. I can press a button on my dashboard to skip the commercials or I could use a voice command to run the exact same script. Then if I ever have to modify how it skips commercials I only have to update it in one spot, the script. This might not seem like a big deal but when I have a lot of automations or buttons that are using the same script it saves so much time when I need to make an update by just updating that one script. For example, I have dozens of automations that send me a notification and if I ever switch devices I don't want to update all those automations. So all those automations just call one script and it's easy to modify if I ever switch phones. So scripts are extremely useful and I definitely recommend taking advantage of them. All right, you're doing great. The last tab in this section is blueprints and these are automations or scripts that are like a template and you can just add your own devices in them so they're super easy to use. There are a few default blueprints already here and I'll select the motion activated light blueprint. As you can see, it's kind of like fill in the blank with my own devices. I'll select the Aqara motion sensor and for the light, I'll choose the bat signal. I can click save and this would essentially create an automation that would turn on a light from the motion sensor and then turn off the light 120 seconds later from no motion. If I want to modify this a little bit more I can select the three dots in the top right and click take control. Here it gives me a preview of what the automation would look like and I can click yes to save the automation or no to keep it as a blueprint. That's obviously a really simple one but there are more complex blueprints that can be really helpful. For example, the other default blueprint is a confirmable notification script. This gives lots of options to customize a notification that might be difficult if you're just getting started. Blueprints can be extremely helpful and what's cool is if I click on discover more it will take me to all the community blueprints people have created. If I see one I like, I can import it to use as my own automation or script. I love it. Now that we've wrapped up this entire section and you're becoming a home assistant pro let's jump back into the settings and select add-ons. These are extra applications similar to apps that run on your computer or phone. As you can see, there are a couple that are already installed but if I click on add-on store in the bottom right it pulls up more that I can add. For example, a file editor to edit files which you'll probably have to do at one point or another but there are more options from the community like the studio code server that also edits files and is even more robust. To add it, I just click install and then I had to refresh the page to actually show it installed. At the top, there are a few different options that I like to have turned on. If it's something I use often I will select show in sidebar so I can go to it quickly. I always keep start on boot checked and then I also select watchdog. This will restart the add-on if it crashes to make sure it's always running. To actually use the add-on, I will select start. I don't have to do this every time but just to get it initially started. Now I can use the add-on and make changes to files if I need to. Some add-ons are a little more complex but don't be scared. All you have to do is click on the documentation page and it'll walk you through the steps on how to set everything up. All right, so how are we doing? Is your brain fried yet? Well, the good news is you've learned most of the big main topics of Home Assistant. Now I'm gonna go over quick important things to know about Home Assistant Rapid Fire style so it's easy to stay awake. First is creating a new user. To do that, go to the settings and click on people. You might wanna create a new user for another family member in the house. That way you can customize things specifically for them or create a guest user for a dashboard that anyone can use. For that guest user, I prefer to turn off administrator so they can't go messing up my smart home. In the dashboard section, I can also disable certain dashboards for non-administrator users. That way the guest user only sees what I want them to have access to. Next is home and away modes. So there's not an official home and away mode but here's how I have it set up. I create a group with my phone and my wife's phone. That way when both of our phones are away from the house, I can run an automation to arm the alarm and run the robot vacuum. Then when at least one of our phones comes home, it will make it so that group is home. There are multiple ways to know if a phone is away or not. I'm using the integration with UniFi which is what I'm using for my router and Wi-Fi. So when my phone disconnects from Wi-Fi for a few minutes, it can change that entity automatically created by the UniFi integration. It works extremely well and has been more reliable than geofencing for me. Another section that you might need to use is developer tools. This is more for advanced features but you may need to do a few things in here every once in a while. For example, if I ever make a change to a YAML file in the configuration, before I reboot Home Assistant, I make sure to come in here and click on check configuration. That will make sure that there are no errors and I only hit restart if I have to. Sometimes I can just reload a portion of the YAML configuration down below to make changes appear in Home Assistant. I'm also in the developer tools often to view the state attributes on the next page over. If I select my kitchen light, there are lots of state attributes that are accessible in Home Assistant that I might not realize are there. So if I'm ever wondering if something's available to be displayed on a dashboard or be used in automation, I come in here and I'm usually surprised on what I can find. One thing I wish I knew earlier when starting with Home Assistant is how many sensors are available from just my phone. Go to settings and click on companion app and choose manage sensors. In there is a massive list of sensors available to be used for automations, especially for Android. I would definitely look through that list every once in a while because they can be extremely helpful. Another blessing and curse of Home Assistant are the updates. As you can see right here at the top of the settings, I need to update the system and Home Assistant with the newest version. When I click on Home Assistant core, it gives me the option to install the update. But before I do, I might want to check it out first. So I click on read release announcement and it will show me all the things that are being updated, which Home Assistant does every month and they do an amazing job at giving tons of new functionality every update. But when I scroll to the bottom, there are backwards incompatible changes that I might want to watch out for. So if I use any of these, I would just click on it and see what's going away or what will be breaking. It's not a big deal or something to be scared of. Just pay attention to it and you'll be fine. Then if I'm good to go on updating, I should definitely create a backup before doing so. Actually, I recommend doing a backup frequently. The way to do that is by going into settings and clicking on system, then choosing backups. To create a backup, select create backup in the bottom right hand corner and I don't have to type anything in here. Just click create and it will automatically set the date as the name of the backup. Make sure to click on it and then click the three little buttons and select download backup. That way I can save it on my computer or Google Drive. Then it'll be safe if Home Assistant ever does crash and not start up. You can actually automatically backup Home Assistant to Google Drive using an add-on if you forget to do it often. Up until this point, everything I've done in Home Assistant has been local. Nothing has been connected to the cloud, but you're probably going to want to connect it to the cloud because some integrations require it and you probably want to control Home Assistant when you're away from the house. So the easiest and most secure way is to use the Home Assistant cloud that can be added right there in the settings. There is a monthly fee, but it does go to supporting those who work on Home Assistant full time. That company is called Nabu Casa. There are ways to access Home Assistant outside your house for free. It does require more work and can be less secure. I'm not going to go into how to do that in this video, but there are plenty of videos on YouTube that can show you how to do that. But hopefully this video helped you learn how to get started. And Home Assistant used to be only for super advanced users, but now it's so much easier to use. I think anyone can use Home Assistant and it's way better than anything offered by the big tech companies. Especially now that devices like Home Assistant Green exist. The fact that you can just buy it on Amazon and get it up and running with the world's most powerful smart home platform in such an easy way is amazing. I have a lot more Home Assistant content in the works, especially that advanced video. So hit that subscribe button if you haven't already. Thanks for watching. Dear smart home spouses, is your spouse not cleaning up? Maybe they're sleeping in late or playing too many video games. Now there's help with Home Assistant. Home Assistant can automate your cleaning, wake up your spouse and even shut off their video games. And they aren't allowed to complain because it's their own automations. Side effects may include headaches, emotional outbursts, loss of sleep, marriage problems. Reed, you haven't spoken to me in days. It's Home Assistant's fault. Ask your YouTube smart home specialist if Home Assistant is right for you. Home Assistant, great for your smart home, questionable for your marriage.