Scenes in Home Assistant are a way of grouping together and pre-programming the states of a
bunch of devices. You can then activate this scene with the click of a button and Home Assistant will
adjust all of the devices that are part of that scene to whatever settings you previously saved.
Here in my office I have several smart lights and some automated blinds behind you there.
When I record a youtube video I need the blinds to be lowered,
these lights to go blue and that one behind me to be set to a specific brightness level.
I want these lights to be set up in a different way again if
I’m gaming on my PC or on a video conference call.
I *could* go into Home Assistant each time and click around until everything is set properly,
but that is cumbersome - especially when you have loads of lights and devices in your room.
If I want to activate my YouTube filming scene, I just click this button in Home Assistant
and all the lights and blinds switch to the settings I want.
I also use scenes in Automations. If I want to quickly activate my video conference scene,
because I’ve got a call coming in,
I can just shake my magic cube and it activates the video conferencing scene.
I also use scenes in my living room to set the lights to specific colours and
brightness levels depending on what is going on.
When Home Assistant detects that the television has been turned on, it triggers an automation
that activates my TV Mode scene. The TV Mode scene selectively dims and turns off specific
lights in the living room to create nice ambient mood lighting for when we’re watching the tele.
If I shake my living room magic cube it turns all the lights up to 100% brightness
and pauses the TV so I can go get a snack or use the bathroom. When I get back I can double-tap
the magic cube and it unpauses the TV and re-activates the TV Mode scene.
The scene can be set to transition in as well, which gives it a nice
fade effect rather than harshly switching all the lights instantly to their preconfigured settings.
Scenes make it really easy to add new devices to your existing automations as well.
If I get a new lamp for my living room, I can just add it to the scene once.
Without the scene I’d have to add it to every single automation that triggers the TV mode.
If you want to know more about my magic cube or smart TV automations,
I’ve linked to the videos I made about these in the description below.
Creating a scene is really easy. Just go to the Configuration area
of Home Assistant and then click on Scenes.
Here you can see a list of scenes that you have in your home.
You can edit existing scenes or click Add Scene to create a new one.
Give your scene a name and start adding the devices or entities that you want to control.
You can add lights, smart switches,
smart blinds - pretty much anything that can be set to a value in Home Assistant.
If you have a smart thermostat or air conditioner you could even add
this to a scene to make the room a certain temperature when the scene is activated.
Once you’ve added all your devices you can click on them and set the various attributes for them.
Then click Save and the scene is ready to use in your automations and dashboards.
Another great use for scenes is dynamically
creating temporary scenes as part of your automations.
Lets say I want my house to automatically turn off the lights and climate control when
I leave the house, and then turn everything back on again to how it was when I get home.
To achieve this I can create a new automation that is triggered when I leave the house.
It will create a new temporary scene called “The Before Times”
and you specify which devices you want to record a snapshot of.
The automation then goes on to turn off all the lights and the climate control.
You then create another scene that is triggered by you returning home,
and it activates “The Before Times” scene.
This will turn on all the lights back to the colour and brightness they were when you left,
and the climate control will turn back on to the settings you had previously set.
It doesn’t matter if you had the temperature set to 30 degrees or 15 degrees,
the scene will know what was set before you left and re-apply it when you get home.
This scene will get over-written each time you leave the house,
so you don’t need to worry about it clogging up your scenes area.
Hopefully this video has shown you an easier way to control your smart home with home assistant.
If you found this video useful, please give it a thumbs up to let me know
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Whilst you’re here, why not watch this next
video for more home automation tips and together we can make your home smarter.