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Comment by jitl | Hacker News Reader

I use a normal automation to turn on the lights every day at sundown, and to turn off the lights every night at ($BEDTIME + 1hr), just as part of daily life. I don't need anything tricky to simulate that pattern when I'm traveling; I just don't disable the automation. I wonder how many people using HomeAssitant for their lights are manually turning lights on and off all the time. I would think most people would set up a daily or weekday + weeknight schedule and be done with it.

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I did this for a long time with timer switches that could be programmed similarly, and switching to HA wasn’t some huge change, it was just nicer. I had to periodically make sure the clock was correct on them, as they would drift a few minutes, and the interface itself was via small LCD screen and buttons.

HA is just a nicer experience, but I wouldn’t say it (or any home automation) is a “need”. It’s better seen as something for tech people to tinker with once they’ve settled a bit in life and are looking for something to do.

I'm guessing you have to do a bit more in maintenance for your Home Assistant instance than set the clock every once and a while?

Not much more than just clicking an update button once in a while. But that’s a standard workflow most people are used to. Updating the clock on the standalone timers has to be done using a tiny LCD screen with an esoteric menu system while holding a manual/pamphlet that’s printed in less than 6pt text. It’s not something you do often enough to remember the procedure.

Of course you can make things more complicated if you want to in HA, or you can set it and mostly forget it if you just use timers.

I use a rule-based automation in OpenHab (similar to HA) to randomly pick a light from a group and toggle it after a random interval, and it repeats the process every 10 minutes from 4pm to 11pm. I find this better than relying on prior history since there is no guarantee that my prior pattern of occupancy would be applicable to a vacation period. Better to just randomly cycle random lights - that will confuse them ;-)

Exactly! What’s the point of that if most of people have evening lights and blinds automated to run daily.

We have some automations, but mostly use homebridge and Apple Home scenes controlled by presence, smart switches, Siri, and the app. I'd imagine that's 10x-100x more common than pure time based automations based on the HA fora.

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