How I built a “Home Alone” automation that makes my smart home look lived in while I travel

Welcome! In this article, we will break everything down in a simple and practical way.

Introduction

If the movies have taught us anything, it’s that the best way to protect your home from burglars when you’re on vacation is to accidentally leave your young son behind. Since this is generally frowned upon, the next best option is to use the Presence Simulation component in Home Assistant, which can convincingly make your home look lived in while you’re away.
What the Presence Simulation custom component does

Replay your real behavior

Credit: Nanoleaf

Presence Simulation is a custom component that’s been created by a Home Assistant user. It’s a simple but brilliant concept: the best way to make your home look lived in is to get it to act exactly the same way as it was when you were actually living in it. Home Assistant includes a core component called the Recorder, which stores all the data generated by your smart home devices. By default, it keeps the last 10 days of data, which you can see in the Home Assistant History tab. Presence Simulation can use this historical information to get devices in your smart home to automatically change to the same states that they were a set number of days ago. For example, if last Wednesday your living room lights turned on at 6:58 PM, turned off at 7:29 PM, turned back on at 7:59 PM, and turned off again at 10:27 PM, that’s exactly what they will do this Wednesday while Presence Simulation is running. You can control a wide range of devices with Presence Simulation, including lights, covers (such as smart blinds), and media players, as well as any other devices that can be controlled with the homeassistant.turn_on and homeassistant.turn_off actions.

Dimensions (exterior)

4.41″L x 4.41″W x 1.26″H

Weight

12 Ounces

Home Assistant Green is a pre-built hub directly from the Home Assistant team. It’s a plug-and-play solution that comes with everything you need to set up Home Assistant in your home without needing to install the software yourself. 

Installing Presence Simulation

You can find it in HACS

Presence Simulation is available to install via HACS. Open HACS and enter Presence Simulation in the search field. Select Presence Simulation from the results. Scroll to the very bottom of the screen and click Download. Once downloaded, restart Home Assistant. Once Home Assistant has restarted, go to Settings > Devices & services, and select the Integrations tab. Click the Add Integration button, search for Presence Simulation, and select the Presence Simulation integration. You should see the Presence Simulation setup screen.
Choosing what to simulate in your home

Selecting the right entities matters

The first field to add is the name for your presence simulation, after which you need to choose the entities that you want to add. There are two ways to do this: you can add each entity one at a time or create groups of entities using the Home Assistant Helper UI and add entire groups. If you add a group, each entity in the group will still turn on and off based on its own history. The key decision is choosing which devices to add to your presence simulation. Lights are the obvious thing to add, although you don’t need to include every light in your home. You should include the main lights that are visible from outside your home, such as the living room, kitchen, and bedrooms, but internal lights, such as hallways, don’t really need to be added. If you have blinds or curtains that are controlled by your smart home, these are also something you should definitely include. Nothing makes your home look like you’re living in it quite like your blinds and curtains opening and closing throughout the day. You don’t just need to make your smart home look like you’re at home; you can make it sound that way, too. You may want to consider adding media players such as smart speakers or even TVs that will make it sound like someone is currently home.

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Configuring how the simulation behaves

Understanding the key settings

Once you’ve added your entities, there are a few more settings you can tweak. The first is the Delta value. This value determines how many days previously Presence Simulation should pull the entity history from. The default setting of 7 days means that your entities will behave exactly as they did a week ago. This is the option I use, since it ensures that my smart home behaves a little differently on weekends and weekdays, which makes the simulation even more convincing.

Lowering the Refresh interval can require more processing power, so I left it as the default setting. Restore state after simulation will restore all entities to the states they were in before you started the simulation, and I use this setting in my setup. If you want, you can add a random time for switching entities. A random value (in seconds) will be added or subtracted from the time an entity state should change, up to the value that you set in this field. The final field allows you to set a default brightness to use for all lights during the simulation. A value of zero will maintain the last brightness value of each light.
Make your home look lived in

Once Presence Simulation is set up, all you need to do is run it. You can activate it manually by turning on the switch.presence_simulation entity or set up an automation to make it run automatically when you go on vacation. For example, you could use information from a calendar as the trigger, or have the simulation trigger when everyone is detected as being away from home for more than a set number of hours. However you trigger it, it should make your home look like someone is living in it in a natural and convincing way, without your son needing to set any booby traps at all.

Conclusion

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