Grouping your assets
Once you have more devices, you may want to target entire groups of devices in automations. It also becomes more challenging to find items in lists. There are a few tools to group your assets: Areas, floors, labels, and categories.
| Taxonomy | Automation target | Entity can have multiple |
|---|---|---|
| Area | ✅ | ❌ |
| Floor | ✅ | ❌ |
| Label | ✅ | ✅ |
| Category | ❌ | ❌ |
Area
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Groups devicesA device is a model representing a physical or logical unit that contains entities. and entitiesAn entity represents a sensor, actor, or function in Home Assistant. Entities are used to monitor physical properties or to control other entities. An entity is usually part of a device or a service.
[Learn more]. -
Can be assigned to one floor.
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Reflects a physical area (or room) in your home.
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Can be used in automations: Allows targeting an entire group of devices with a service call. For example, turning off all the lights in the living room.
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Areas can also be used to automatically generate cards, such as the Area card.
Floor
- Groups areas.
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DevicesA device is a model representing a physical or logical unit that contains entities.
and entitiesAn entity represents a sensor, actor, or function in Home Assistant. Entities are used to monitor physical properties or to control other entities. An entity is usually part of a device or a service.
[Learn more] cannot be assigned to floors, but to areas only. - Can have multiple areas.
- Can be used in automations and scripts as a target for actions. For example, to turn off all the lights on the downstairs floor when you go to bed.
Labels
- Can be assigned to areas, devices, entities, automations, scenes, scripts, and helpers.
- Can be used in automations and scripts as a target for actions and services.
- Labels can also be used to filter data in tables. For example, you can filter the list of devices to show only devices with the label
heavy energy usageor turn these devices off when there is not a lot of solar energy available.
Category
- Groups items in a table.
- Categories are unique for each table. The automations page can have different categories than the scene, scripts, or helpers settings page.
