r/homeassistant • u/attticrattt • 19h ago
Let's hear your favorite vacation automations!
I am heading out of town in a few weeks, would love to hear folks favorite vacation automations.
As a note, our dogs will be staying at home, isolated to 1 room. Our neighbors will be spending a decent amount of time at our house either stopping by to feed them, or spend some time with them. Planning on buying a Ring Keypad to make our Alarmo more accessible for them.
Anything anyone has setup that they love? Thinking of a script to turn lights on semi randomly throughout the day/evening...
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u/MinimalLemonade 18h ago
I’m on the last week of my 3-week summer holiday, how fitting :D All of my holiday automations are simply there because I can tho. There is nothing really “useful” tbh
My home automatically switches into vacation mode when it sees “Urlaub” (German for holiday/vacation) in my personal GCal When this is active and I’m at home, it changes my wake-up routine a bit. The simulated sunrise is slower, my PC and some music come on a few minutes before the alarm rings. The Spotify playlist depends on the weather forecast, because I like to match my music to the weather or rather the feeling that comes with sunshine, rain, etc. My vacuum also automatically cleans my desk as soon as I spend more than 5 minutes in the bathroom after waking up (in other words: I’m showering), because I spend loads of time there when I don’t have to work and I’m not travelling. Picks up the crumbs of pretzels, weed and other stuff from the gaming sessions the night before :D
Separate from that, I have extended presence detection with more states than just “Home” and “Not Home”. I use “Just Arrived”, “Home”, “Just Left”, “Away” and “Extended Away”. Extended Away means I’ve been gone longer than 48 hours. So in other words, I’m travelling. This triggers the “Presence Simulation” integration, which does exactly what the name says: simulate my presence (lights etc.). I don’t really need this tbh, since I live in a nice area in Germany and could probably leave my door open for a week without anything happening. But it’s fun to automate, so why not. I also have a security camera pointed at my huge glass front. Never heard of a break-in in my area, but if one ever happened, that would be the obvious spot. Again, not needed but fun. Oh, and my smart irrigation for the plants on my roof terrace also activates when I’m travelling. I don’t use it when I’m at home because I enjoy watering them manually :p
Most other stuff just continues as if I’m not on holiday. My roller shutters keep opening and closing in the morning and evening as if I were home, my alarm activates anyway every time I leave and yeah.
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u/Silencer306 16h ago
Whats the vacuum that works on your desk?
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u/MinimalLemonade 15h ago
Meant the area around my desk. The desk itself is always clean, cant even stand dust on there. So it lands on the floor.. :D
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u/biblicalrain 17h ago
I have interior and exterior lights that come on every day no matter what.
On top of that, for vacations, I wrote some automations for some rooms that turns the room's lights on and off at somewhat random times. I did this by adding a random delay, with a large range, before the lights get turned on or off.
So the playroom lights automation will be triggered at 8pm, but the first action is a delay that will randomly pick a number of minutes between 10 and 90. Same thing with the off automation, trigger at say 11pm with a random delay between 10 and 90 minutes. Do that for a few rooms.
I think those together is good enough. Nobody's tracking and analyzing the timing of the lights, I'm just trying to avoid having the house be completely dark for days at a time.
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u/redranteraver 19h ago
What about playing something on the TV or speakers - something the dogs might enjoy as well.
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u/MisterSnuggles 17h ago
I’ve made critical alerts get emailed to the people watching my house, this way they can know about (and hopefully deal with!) water leaks or other issues without needing to be fully on-boarded into Home Assistant.
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u/nicholam77 17h ago
Vacation Mode that:
Prevents automations from running (like if someone comes over to check on something while we’re gone, I don’t want it to do my normal arrival routine and turn on all the lights and Sonos and announce messages).
Manages thermostat (puts nest in Eco setting when enabled, and automatically sets heat or cool point on our way home so it’s comfortable when we arrive)
Enables evening simulated presence lighting routine.
Turns on “Alarm”, which is not a real alarm but literally just sends a mobile notification if an interior motion detector fires while we’re away, and says which room
Sets mobile dashboard with some conditional buttons / simplifies home page for doing things you might want while away (triggering thermostat, door statuses, temp info, alarm status, etc)
Outside of HA I have a smart lock that can do user-based or one time burnable door codes in case I need a neighbor to drop a package in the back door.
I also have (dumb) exterior lighting on a sunset-sunrise schedule.
Other ideas:
I have a video doorbell but I’d like to do a dedicated package cam.
And a garage door sensor so I know if that’s been opened / broken into while away.
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u/harrylepotter 13h ago
The Guest mode addon lets you provide your neighbor with a time-boxed unique URL for control of specific entities such
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u/plasma2002 18h ago
Remember not to force guests to have to use your smart house. But some good automated can be nice. Small stuff, like illuminating a cupboard when the door is opened, or motion detected in the driveway or yard. Things that are invisibly helpful are the best for guests
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u/6SpeedBlues 8h ago
My Vacation Mode actually turns a few things off and changes how the HVAC works (higher set temp for AC or lower set temp for heat, no changes throughout the day).
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u/mysmarthouse 5h ago edited 4h ago
I liked a lot of the ideas in this thread, however something I found difficult is telling when a cat sitter enters the house.
In node red I have a presence faker, however that presence faker pauses any additional light actions for one hour if it detects that the front door was unlocked, after one hour it resumes the presence faker actions (lights on and off, only at night).
The house still goes into a bedtime routine (shuts off everything and sets additional alarms) at 1am.
I did enhance some of my automations thanks to ideas in this thread, now if it detects both of us more than 75 miles away from the house it will just turn on vacation mode automatically (using proximity integration) and turn off (with the guest over boolean turned off).
Ecobee vacation mode seems great, however I'm not really big on relying on a calendar to set vacation mode in ecobee, and the default will turn off vacation mode after 14 days, so I set an additional automation to check if I've been away for 13 days and to delete vacation mode, delay 45 seconds, and then re add vacation mode to add another 14 days.
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u/You_are_blocked 4h ago
Im very much letting my normal morning and evening routines run when I’m away, plus an activated alarm. A bit less lights will switch on during the day/evening and it’s all a bit random around a 45 min timeframe. Away status is detected whenever I’m (my mobile) more than 100m away from home, doesn’t matter for how long.
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u/djchillerz 19h ago
For the lights there's a HACS plugin called presence simulator. If you're running node red you can search for something called vacation lights.
My house turns on vacation mode whenever we are more than 100km from home and the sun sets. Now we might not be on vacation, but it is useful:
Heating turns off (AC / radiator thermostats are set to a safety temp of 17c)
lights do something... You could have a specific script or use the HACS presence simulator
alarm is on and stays on.
internal cameras come on, if they were off.
environmental warnings are sent to phone, not played on speakers internally e.g water leak