5 Home Assistant integrations you’re probably not using—but should be

Home Assistant includes a slew of native integrations that can do everything from connecting specific smart home devices to tracking daylight hours from sunrise to sunset, so your lighting automations know when to turn on and off. Here are some lesser-known Home Assistant integrations worth exploring if you don’t already use them.

Waste collection schedule

My waste collection automation is still one of my favorites. One Friday morning, the first time we enter the kitchen, a motion detector triggers an automation. The Echo Show 5 in the kitchen makes a voice announcement (in my own voice), reminding us that it’s trash day and telling us what trash collection is this week. Since I installed it, we have never forgotten to take out the appropriate trash.

I built my automation from scratch, pulling information from the website that lists the trash collection schedule for my area. However, you don’t need to create your own version from scratch. The waste collection program integration is available on HACS and does the heavy lifting for you. All you have to do is enter your country and state or province, and the integration finds the relevant collection schedule and integrates it into Home Assistant’s schedule. You can then use this data to create dashboards, fire automations, or any other purpose you can imagine.

TTS Chime

Being able to play your own ads from your smart speakers is really useful. Whether it’s alerting you that someone is at the door, reminding you that you need to leave shortly if you want to get to your destination on time, or letting you know what collection it is, voice announcements are ideal for the home, where you don’t always have your phone handy to see notifications.

One problem with voice notifications is that they can be a bit surprising. When you’re home alone and suddenly someone else starts talking out of nowhere, it can make you jump. Playing a sound before an announcement is a simple way to solve this problem, but if you play a sound then generate a text-to-speech (TTS) announcement, there can often be a significant gap between the sound and the announcement when generating the audio, which isn’t great.

Chime TTS solves this problem. It combines the audio file of your choice with the TTS announcement, creating a single audio file that only plays once the TTS is ready. You get a perfect combination of sound immediately followed by the announcement without any lag.

Once configured, simply call one service (chime_tts.say) and the sound of your choice will play before your announcement. The integration can also pause playing the current media while the ad is playing, then resume playing the media after the ad ends. You can install Chime TTS through HACS.

Multiscraping

Home Assistant has a native integration that you can use to retrieve information from websites. The Scrape integration can work if you only need to extract a single piece of information from a simple web page, but it can be frustrating if you’re trying to do something more complicated.

Multiscrape is a custom component that builds on Scrape and makes it much more powerful. Using Multiscrape, you can retrieve multiple fields from the same page in a single HTTP request and have each field retrieved become its own sensor in Home Assistant. You can also set the scan interval for scraping to ensure that you are not constantly scraping a site.

There are countless ways to use this integration. For example, you can extract the price and number of items in stock on a website for a product you want to purchase. You can then create automation to alert you when the price drops below a set level and stock is available.

It’s also a useful way to get information from services that don’t have an API but expose the relevant data on a local web interface. For example, if your printer generates a web interface that displays ink levels or paper levels, you can scrape that interface to add sensors for your ink and paper levels in Home Assistant. This is a truly powerful tool worth exploring. You can install Multiscrape via HACS.

working day

I have several automations that do different things depending on whether it’s a weekday or weekend. I don’t need adverts reminding children of after-school clubs on Saturdays or Sundays, for example.

Setting automations to only trigger on weekdays is trivial, but things can fall apart when a holiday falls on a weekday. Home Assistant thinks it’s a normal day and triggers all the usual automations when they’re not needed. The Workday integration aims to solve exactly this problem.

You provide your country and state, and the integration generates a simple “business day” sensor. If this sensor is on, it’s a day’s work, and if it’s off, it’s not. Adding a condition when starting a Home Assistant home automation allows you to check the status of this sensor and operate the automation only depending on whether the sensor is on or off.

You can customize the sensor by adding your own non-working days to the list or excluding those that were automatically added if you work on those days. It’s a native Home Assistant integration, so you don’t need to install it through HACS, and according to the integration page, only 5.5% of active installations use it, which is way too few.

Presence simulation

It’s simple enough to set something up in Home Assistant to turn lights on and off when you’re not home, but how do you make sure the pattern for turning your lights on and off is realistic? The integration of Presence Simulation solves this problem in a very smart way.

When you configure the integration, you tell it which lights, switches, or media players you want to use in your presence simulation. When you activate the simulator, it uses the state history of these entities and matches the state to what it was a set number of days ago (seven days by default). In other words, if you turned your light on at 7:13 p.m. last Tuesday and turned it off at 10:22 p.m. that same evening, that’s exactly what will happen on a Tuesday evening when you’re not at home.

This is a simple but effective solution for achieving a realistic presence simulation and could be enough to deter people from attempting to gain access to your home. Presence simulation is another integration that must be installed via HACS.

Integrations are what make Home Assistant so powerful. They allow you to create your own bespoke smart home software that does exactly what you want. With so many integrations available natively or through HACS, the biggest challenge is keeping track of them all.