Top Home Assistant Project Ideas: Automations and Setups That Make Your Home Smarter

Home Assistant can do practically anything in a smart home. That's both its greatest selling point and the reason a lot of people install it, stare at the dashboard, and wonder "okay, now what?" The platform is only as useful as what you build with it.

Here are project ideas that go beyond turning lights on and off, from practical everyday automations to more ambitious builds.

Presence Detection That Actually Works

Most smart home presence detection is binary: you're either home or you're not. Home Assistant lets you layer multiple detection methods for something much more reliable.

Combine your phone's GPS (through the companion app), WiFi connection status, Bluetooth detection (using ESPresense on ESP32 boards), and a door sensor on the front entrance. Create an automation group that only marks you as "away" when multiple indicators agree. This eliminates the false "away" triggers that plague GPS-only systems.

Take it further with room-level presence using ESPresense nodes placed in different rooms. The system tracks which room you're in based on your phone or watch's Bluetooth signal. Lights follow you through the house. The thermostat adjusts based on which rooms are occupied. Music moves with you from room to room.

Whole-Home Energy Dashboard

Install current transformer sensors (like Emporia Vue or Shelly EM) on your electrical panel and feed the data into Home Assistant. Build a dashboard that shows real-time and historical power consumption for individual circuits or your whole home.

Track how much energy your HVAC uses each month. Get alerts when a device draws unusual power (which might indicate a problem). Compare your usage day over day, week over week. Use the Energy Dashboard built into Home Assistant for the overview, and Grafana with InfluxDB for detailed historical analysis.

This project pays for itself once you identify which devices are silently eating electricity. A lot of people discover their old fridge or always-on entertainment center is costing way more than they assumed.

Smart Thermostat Logic

Don't just schedule your thermostat. Make it intelligent. Build automations that consider room occupancy (from presence sensors), outdoor temperature (from a weather integration), window state (open or closed sensors), time of day, and whether anyone is actually home.

A simple but effective setup: if no motion is detected in the house for 30 minutes and both phones are more than a mile away, switch to eco mode. When someone arrives home, check the outdoor temperature and pre-heat or pre-cool accordingly. Open windows automatically disable the HVAC to save energy.

Layer in seasonal adjustments, guest mode overrides, and manual override timers so the system doesn't fight you when you want to change something.

Automated Lighting Scenes

Go beyond basic on/off automation. Use light groups, color temperature shifts, and brightness curves that change throughout the day.

Morning: lights come on gradually at a cool, bright color temperature to help you wake up. Midday: bright and neutral for productivity. Evening: warm, dimmed lights that promote relaxation. Night: only motion-triggered path lighting at the lowest brightness.

Circadian lighting like this sounds like a luxury until you try it. After a week, going back to static lighting feels wrong. Adaptive Lighting integration handles this automatically for supported bulbs.

Add movie mode, dinner party mode, and reading mode scenes that set every light in a room to the right level with one tap or voice command.

Water Leak Detection System

Place water leak sensors (Aqara or Zigbee-based sensors are cheap and reliable) near washing machines, under sinks, by water heaters, and in basements. When any sensor triggers, Home Assistant sends an immediate push notification, flashes lights red, and plays an announcement on all speakers.

If you have a smart water shutoff valve (like the Moen Flo or Dome shut-off), the automation can close the main water supply automatically. Water damage is one of the most expensive home disasters, and a system like this can prevent thousands in damage from a slow leak caught early.

Package and Delivery Tracking

Integrate mail tracking services into Home Assistant. When a package is out for delivery, change the front porch camera to higher sensitivity. Turn on the porch light even during the day for better camera visibility. Send a notification when the doorbell camera detects a person on the porch.

Add a "packages delivered today" counter on your dashboard. If you get a lot of deliveries, this becomes surprisingly useful for knowing when to check the porch.

Appliance Monitoring

Smart plugs with power monitoring on your washing machine, dryer, and dishwasher let Home Assistant detect when a cycle finishes. The power signature drops below a threshold, and an announcement plays on the nearest speaker: "The washing machine is done."

Take it further by tracking cycle counts, energy per load, and average run times. You'll know when an appliance is running less efficiently, which can be an early warning sign for maintenance.

Local Voice Control

Set up Home Assistant's voice pipeline with a Wyoming satellite (an ESP32 with a microphone and speaker) in each room. Speech-to-text runs locally through Whisper, wake word detection through openWakeWord, and text-to-speech through Piper. Everything stays on your network.

The voice quality and response time aren't quite at Alexa or Google levels yet, but they're getting closer with every update. For anyone who wants voice control without cloud microphones listening constantly, this is the project to invest in.

Vacation and Away Mode

Build a comprehensive away automation that goes beyond what any commercial platform offers. Random light patterns that simulate someone being home (varying rooms, timing, and brightness). TV turning on and off at realistic intervals. Blinds opening in the morning and closing at night. Front camera entering high-alert mode with instant notifications for any motion.

Add a vacation dashboard that shows you the state of every sensor, lock, and camera at a glance. Include temperature monitoring in case your heating fails while you're away (pipe freeze prevention is a real concern in cold climates).

Garden and Irrigation

Soil moisture sensors, temperature sensors, and weather forecast data combine to create an irrigation system that waters your garden only when needed. Home Assistant checks tomorrow's rain forecast before deciding to water today. It adjusts watering duration based on soil moisture readings and recent temperatures.

Over a growing season, smart irrigation uses noticeably less water than a fixed timer while keeping plants healthier. Add a camera pointed at your garden for timelapse photos of plant growth throughout the season.

Multi-Zone Audio

Integrate your speakers (Sonos, Chromecast Audio, snapcast, or a mix) into Home Assistant for whole-home audio control. Build automations that play different audio in different rooms: news in the kitchen during breakfast, focus music in the office during work hours, calm playlists in the bedroom at night.

The media player controls in Home Assistant work across different speaker brands, so you're not locked into one ecosystem. Create a dashboard card that controls everything from one place.

Where to Start

If you're new to Home Assistant, start with one project that solves a daily annoyance. The laundry notification, the presence-based thermostat, or automated lighting scenes are all high-impact, low-complexity starting points.

The projects that stick are the ones your whole household benefits from. An automation that only you understand and only you can fix isn't a smart home. It's a hobby project. Build things that work quietly in the background and make everyone's life a little easier.