#Can I turn off an area without disabling automations?

1 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

normal frost
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I have a lot of automations and its been hard to track some. So I decided to add them to the area in which the primarily operate in which helps me find them and also makes adding them to a dashboard simple. I spent a long time setting an area for all 74 automations 🙂 Went to bed thinking I did a good job bringing order to chaos!
However I woke up to a cold coffee machine 🙁 Turns out that now my automations are assigned to an area, I can no longer turn the kitchen off as it will also turn the automations off. While I could go and add individual entities to my bedtime script, it makes for a bit of overhead in future should I add another device to the kitchen. It seems much cleaner to just turn the kitchen off.
Is there a simple way to continue to turn an area off without turning the automations off? I was thinking maybe I could use labels to exclude some things? Maybe there is a service that doesn't turn automations off (just switches and lights), or a flag I can pass to the generic turn-off to exclude some things? Searing for solutions that allow me to keep my automations assigned to areas. Thanks!

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I think one solution might be to use switch.turn_off and light.turn_off and then I can continue to use area. But wondering if there is something more elegant that allows me to just exclude some devices or domains from generic turn_off?

wooden dome
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I avoid using any action targets but entities or labels. Even with domain-specific actions like light.turn_off, the other targeting options are just too non-specific and prone to cause issues. The light domain often includes indicator lights and screens/displays while the switch domain can include reset/reboot switches and relays for more complex systems like HVAC... stuff you really don't want turned "on" or "off" without consideration.

normal frost
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ah yeah good point. I guess I could use a generic label for any device I want to toggle off and then target this.

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Thanks!

wooden dome
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Labels have been a real boon both for grouping without having to actually create group helpers and a powerful addition to templating.

normal frost
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thanks for your help, I was thinking about this all wrong (using labels to exclude, not include)

junior fjord
short swan
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How do you « turn off an area »

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My guess reading your original post is that you use home_assistant.turn_off ?

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If it is the case then I strongly advise not to do that, you never really really control what you are turning off
Turn off by domain it’s much much cleaner !

As for assigning automation to areas, I usually don’t and rely on categories to organise them by the different aspect of what I automate. And I keep the area assignments to « the things I can touch »