When I picked up Home Assistant as my DIY route to building a smart home, spending on smart devices was inevitable. Still, I love using it every day since I get to learn a lot about smart devices while attempting to build a smart home that suits my goals and usage. While I enjoy several integrations, I'm amazed at how smart home automations are customizable to make my life easier and also save some money. Here’s how I use Home Assistant automations to save money every month by preventing energy wastage and optimizing the use of my smart devices.

4 Automatically switch off lights when no one is around

No point letting them stay on

Smart lights are a great starting point and are often highly recommended for a good reason. Home Assistant made it easy for me to play around with the different light cards and also incorporated simple automations. Initially, I learned how to turn on lights at a specific time in the evening and turn them off in the morning. After several embarrassing and even spooky encounters of lights turning on automatically, I tweaked the automation to take place only when I’m around.

Next, I plan on adding a couple of motion sensors with inexpensive ESP32 chips to control smart lights, just like my colleague, Adam Conway, did. However, I might limit their usage to control smart lights in my room before exposing them to my family. That’s what I consider a little bit of saving, even though it’ll take several months to add up to a decent number. These automations helped me stop wasting electricity by leaving the smart lights on, which is a form of saving, too.

3 Turn off the smart devices when no one is home

Motion sensors can help

One of the earliest automations I created was to switch off my smart devices whenever I am not at home, using phone tracking. Since I started small, the automation checked my phone’s location within a defined room and zone (my home). When I left my house for more than five minutes, the Home Assistant would trigger the automation to switch off my light and put my computer, if active, in hibernation in my room. Such automation ensures that my smart home devices don’t stay on for long when my family and I are away. I extended the phone-tracking condition in automation to my family members’ phones as well to cover my bases.

For the appliances and devices without any smarts, I connected them up to smart plugs and added a similar automation to turn them off entirely. It took me several weeks to properly test my automation, since my family is still getting comfortable with smart plugs and automations. I’m very close to installing motion sensors to help fine-tune my automation further.

2 Shut down the devices that stay idle for too long

Monitor and manage with smart plugs

Contrary to popular assumptions, several electronics continue to consume power when left in standby mode. That hard lesson struck me when I noticed that using TVs, game consoles, monitors, and my Windows desktop still consumed some power. I continue to use smart plugs with my monitor and desktop to keep track of their energy usage when they’re in standby mode. Although it’s significantly less when measured daily, it still results in some energy consumption over time.

I often leave my game console in standby mode while it downloads the game. But after integrating it into Home Assistant, I realized how much power it consumed even in the standby state. Not to mention the earful I get from my family when I leave it on. The Home Assistant automations can shut down these idle devices and cut off the power supply to them. At the same time, I’m aware that the energy savings may not be significantly large enough to notice, but every dollar counts.

1 Manage your thermostat based on when you arrive or leave

Make it turn off based on weather conditions

Modern thermostats are also adjustable and perfect contenders to manage with Home Assistant. Relative energy consumption for cooling in summer and heating in winter becomes apparent. Besides, monitoring the energy usage showed spikes whenever a window was left open while cooling or heating a room. Straightforward automation to turn off or pause the thermostat works with phone tracking.

However, adding dedicated sensors for windows and doors could serve as a better alternative, especially when I can remotely trigger the thermostat to turn on or off when I’m approaching home. You may integrate a weather API in Home Assistant and include it in the automation to make the thermostat work reactively based on real-world conditions.

Savings will compound over time

Running automations to turn off unused or idle smart devices does help save some money every month. Those savings aren’t significant right now for a number of reasons. For starters, I continually add new smart devices and services to Home Assistant, which also accounts for the money I spend on enjoying smart home automation. To get a fair and near-accurate amount, I need to continue using Home Assistant automations without adding more devices and not tweaking them for several months (or a year) to get an average.

That said, Home Assistant’s automations offer several possibilities to help me save money every month. And that’s not just limited to energy savings. Using sensor templating, you can create a template to track Amazon product prices and create an automation to alert you whenever the listed price drops or hits your assigned price for products you want to buy. One of the things I admire about Home Assistant is that you can create automations without additional hardware.