15 Home Assistant Tips You MUST Do

0:22 General Settings 0:58 Zones 1:16 Dairy Liquid 1:43 Advanced Mode 2:03 Static IP 4:06 Enable SSH 5:15 Enable 2FA 6:12 Install Apps 6:57 Backup 7:31 File Editor 8:22 Create Areas 9:27 NAS Media Storage 10:10 HACS 11:10 Watchman 11:42 Remote Access 12:52 Enable Analytics

Tailscale seems to me like the sweet spot for accessing this from outside the home. You don't have to open any ports and you leave your firewall guarding your home network, while still having full access to the HA. But thanks for this video, as a guy just starting out with HA there were several great tips in here I implemented right away. Now if someone could just explain to me why changing your home zone radius is borderline impossible, whereas you can easily do so on added zones, I'd be thrilled. Sometimes, the open-sourciness of the whole thing slaps you in the face, with inexplicable weirdness.

I have been watching your channel for the last year and I have learned quite a lot; in fact I am currently working on an Automation system for a special project car I am working on and youre videos on home assistant have helped me 'customise' for this project, thank you.

thanks this video helped me to get a qr code for my gust uploaded to my ha wich i added to the mobile dashboard tot oral you did. now if someone comes over and needs access to my hidden guest network i just pull out my phone and say "here you go".

Perfect timing, I'm about to go down the HA rabbit hole. Thanks Lewis.

Just getting back into HA. This was very helpful to remind me of a few things, plus some new stuff. Thank you.

Regarding HA Areas: If you've got a pre-configured HUE environment, you can just add this and it'll create the areas corresponding to your HUE environment. So you don't necessarily have to go the long way of actually typing it out.

Which addon can be used to clean the configuration of invalid or replaced devices?

Thanks for the information. If you could add timestamps it would be great for further reference. I really enjoy these videos.

Add-ons aren't available if you are running in docker :(

Nice Lewis! Is you HA static IP on an IOT VLAN with other IOT devices or how is the general network setup, for Nabu Casa or other external communicatio - remote access, voise, etc. A video topic? Right in your wheelhouse!! A No. 16, might be defining a area/device/entity naming convention. It can get messy later if you don't initially think it through. No. 17 Documentation. Lots of new stuff all going on all at once. Days or weeks later, hard to remember what you decided or what all these similarly named automations do!!

Great video, I'm about to restart my HA journey during this winter (been off it for over a year), and this is perfect for a smooth installation👌

Awesome Lewis. Thanks again for taking the time to produce such an informative video.

Thanks for the Watchman suggestion, I hadn't heard of it until I recently saw a video from Mostly Chris and he walks through the setup. Watchman is exactly what I needed after a recent OS migration and addition & removal of some devices!

Going through this as I'd just got HA set up with a basic configuration and was ready to poke at some more advanced things - I made an note to do the SSH and backup setup, and somewhere in the process of uninstalling the basic terminal and installing the advanced one, something goes wrong and hoses my setup (couldn't even restart it, and it didn't come back up after a hard reset). Don't be like me, set up your backups and troubleshooting tools *first*!

Thanks for sharing. Very much education to soak in.

I am using argon one case for my rpi 4. Amazing thing for cooling and storage on rpi4 I just found integration that allows control of the integrated fan based on cpu temp while using HA. I do recommend

Great video! I've been using home assistant for years and didn't know about Watchman.

Great video! well covered! You mentioned backups, well, I can attest to that!!! I made a catastrophic failure in my proxmox nodes about a month ago, and due to that failure, the only way forward was reinstalling proxmox on my 3 nodes again, redo all the vm's, litterally everything. Now, when it came to home assistant, I had my backups, however, they where on one of the servers that bricked, so I had no choice but to completely redo HA from scratch. My own stupid mistake, and it took me from 7Pm till 4AM in the morning to get the house back up to a "working", but basic state. It was a nightmare to do, and even today I still clean up due to that disaster. I wouldn't have had any problem, if i just kept the backup off site, like all the others. Worst part, I had my zigbee network backed up, and it was off site, but it was the wrong zigbee config. It was the one from my apartment, not my house..... Anyhow, BACKUP, BACKUP, BACKUP PEOPLE, and next to that, keep at least 1, if possible 2 backup's off site, and reachable at any given time! I do now, but it was a very bitter pill to swallow...... Al always, great tips, great video, keep it up!

Nice.