Making Your Home Automation Work for You and Your Guests: A Guide to Smart Home Guest Management

Home automation is a fantastic way to make your home more comfortable and reduce the amount of manual work you need to do. Automating your lights, locks, and other devices can be a great time-saver, but sometimes things can go wrong when your schedule changes. One such example is when you have house guests, who can throw off the regular routines in your home and cause helpful automations to become disruptive.

In this blog post, we will cover the current setup in our home and the adjustments we made to our home automation to better handle house guests. We will discuss the changes made to our Google Assistant routine and Roomba vacuum schedule and provide examples of how to make similar adjustments in your home.

Current Setup:

In our home, we use a Google Assistant routine to say "Good night" and turn off the lights around the house, and lock the doors. This works well when the schedule in the house is regular, but when things change, such as having guests over, it can cause problems. For example, the routine would normally turn off the lights in the guest room, but when guests are staying over, this can be quite disruptive as the lights and fan could turn off unexpectedly.

Another issue we faced was with our Roomba vacuum, which would vacuum the downstairs at night, including the guest room. When guests are staying over and the guest room door is closed, the vacuum would bang against the door at night, causing discomfort to the guests.

Adjusting the Home Automation for Guests:

To better handle having house guests over, we made some adjustments to our home automation setup. The first thing we did was create a toggle helper, in Home Assistant, that would represent when the guest room is occupied at night. With this helper, we made the following adjustments to our home automations: