I’ve been rebuilding my Home Assistant setup from the ground up. The goal is reliability first, then clarity: fewer magic entities, cleaner naming, and dashboards that answer “what should I do next?” rather than just dumping metrics. This post is a snapshot of the current state, the decisions behind it, and what’s left to finish.

Why rebuild?

Over time the system had grown organically. Entities drifted, names diverged, and the UI turned into a scrolling checklist. Rebuilding gave me a chance to:

• Standardise entity naming for humans and automations.
• Separate “control” from “observability”.
• Streamline the security view for quick, at-a-glance checks.
• Reduce dashboard noise by surfacing only actionable states.

The dashboard model

I’m using a three-tier layout:

1. Home Overview
   High-level state: power, “things that are on”, and a short list of recent automations. If something looks wrong here, I can drill down.

2. Domains
   Focused views like Security and Energy. Each domain answers one type of question end-to-end.

3. Rooms
   Contextual control and diagnostics for a single space. The Office page has become the main testing ground for the rebuild principles.

Security view

The security view is intentionally minimal:

• Doors: binary sensors grouped with last-changed times so I can see if something’s just been opened.
• Detection: motion per area with relative recency (“24 minutes ago” style).
• Monitoring: vibration and front door monitoring widgets for noisy/quiet status.
• Active: a small summary tile (“3 Lights On”) to nudge me to shut things down.

This screen loads quickly and is readable from a few metres away. It also doubles as a sanity check before bed.

Alarmo & Zigbee keypad integration

All of the security is orchestrated through the Alarmo plugin. This provides the core arming/disarming logic and makes it straightforward to build automations on top of. A Zigbee keypad at the entrance ties in so that each family member has their own unique code for disarming the system.

There are two alarm profiles in daily use:

• Away mode: arms all entrances, motion, and presence detectors. This is the “full lockdown” profile when no one is home.
• Night mode: arms only the entrances. This allows us to move freely inside while still keeping the perimeter secured.

Extra security automations

• Lights-off shortcut
  The “number of lights on” tile isn’t just informational. Clicking it will turn off all active lights, making it a quick end-of-day or leaving-the-house shortcut.

• Porch light on vibration
  The vibration sensor on the front door doubles as a convenience trigger. When vibration is detected, the porch light turns on and stays on until one minute after vibration stops. This means Becky can come home late, wiggle the door, and immediately have light to see the lock and keys.

• Porch & hallway lights on door open
  When the front door is opened in darkness, the porch light comes on for the duration of the opening. At the same time, the hallway light inside is switched on. Once the door closes, the hallway light turns off automatically if no motion is detected in the hallway for 2 minutes.

• Door/Window open notifications
  Whenever any door opens, a push notification is sent to all phones connected to Home Assistant, explicitly stating which door changed state. This provides immediate awareness whether we’re home or away. The same pattern will be applied to windows as their contact sensors are added, so openings are surfaced in real time without needing to check the dashboard.

Upcoming sensor upgrades

To strengthen coverage and improve accuracy, more presence sensors are being added:

• Kitchen: one new presence sensor to improve coverage and accuracy in a busy space.
• Conservatory: one new sensor to ensure perimeter activity is tracked in both day and night modes.
• Front Room: an additional sensor is being added because one isn’t enough to reliably detect presence across the whole room. These two sensors will be logically combined with an OR condition into a single “front room presence” sensor. This composite entity will replace the originals in all future automations and alarms, simplifying logic and ensuring no blind spots.

This layered approach to sensors will make the alarm profiles more robust and help daily automations (like lighting and occupancy) behave more consistently.

Office page

The office page is my test bed for the rebuild principles:

• Sockets & Lights: only the ones I actually toggle daily. Long-tail devices moved to a secondary “All Entities” panel.
• Active & Security: mini mirrors of the domain views so I don’t context-switch.
• Automation activity: key automations are surfaced with timestamps, so I can see at a glance what has run recently.

Naming & structure

I’ve standardised on:

• Devices follow area_device (e.g., office_printer, office_socket_strip).
• Entities follow <domain>.<area>_<device> (e.g., switch.office_printer).
• Helper booleans/sensors are prefixed with binary_sensor.office_* or sensor.office_*.
• Automations are named as verbs: automation.office_printer_power_saver, automation.office_lights_off.

The result is cleaner YAML and easier Jinja templates.

Lessons from the rebuild so far

• Actionable timestamps beat raw states. “4 minutes ago” provides context that pure on/off can’t.
• Composite helpers simplify automations. A combined binary_sensor.front_room_presence is easier to reason about than juggling multiple raw sensors.
• Naming conventions save hours later. Refactoring once means I’m not hunting for inconsistent entities scattered through YAML.
• One screen, one purpose. Each dashboard shows exactly what affects its domain; deeper diagnostics are available elsewhere.

Stability work

• Device classes: ensuring sensors report the correct class so Lovelace icons and colours are consistent.
• Last-changed hygiene: using history stats or utility meters only where needed to keep Recorder lean.
• Spare entities audit: old MQTT topics and stale entities are being removed so templates don’t accidentally reference ghosts.

What’s next

• Energy panel v2: aggregate office-only energy and cost with a rolling 7-day view for switches and devices.
• Expanded notifications: rolling out the door/window push pattern to more sensors and tailoring urgency by type (e.g., back door open late at night = high priority).
• Backups: snapshot + Git versioning for all YAML and dashboard JSON so the layout is reproducible.

Takeaway

The rebuild is already paying off. The dashboards are calmer, the logic is clearer, and the system feels less like a jumble of sensors and more like a coherent tool. Most importantly, everything now funnels toward a simple question on each screen: What should I do right now? That’s the yardstick I’m using as I finish the rest of the house.