I don’t have many, I find home assistant is a tool in search of a need.

• Run the robot vacuum when I leave the house.
• When I arrive home or open the garage door after sunset, turns on the rear porch lights and then turns it off after 15 minutes. (I have a detached garage.)
• Turn on select outdoor lights at sunset.
• Turns off all outdoor lights at sunrise, so if I forget to turn off the lights around my deck they eventually do get turned off.
• I have a button near where I sit in the living room that controls all four lights in the living room.
• I have a button on my dashboard that just turns off all the lights in my house.
• I have a button near my bar that turns on multiple lights and a neon sign. I was intending to add effects and scenes around the bar too so I could press another button and have a show go off.

I did a few small automation for my car and the charger.

When I plug in the charger at home, it will check the current electricity prices and if below a certain threshold it will setup a plan to charge in those hours.

I also have a button I can press to make a plan depending on how many kwh I need as well as when I need it.

It will then automatically start and stop the charger based on these plans

For me, my favourites are definetely some light automations, namingly

• motion detectors and window sensors (where there aren’t insect nets) turning on and off the lights
• adaptive lighting automations setting brightness and shade based on the time

more than that

• turning down the (usually somewhat loud) music in the bathroom when I open the window to the street
• running the vaccuum when I’m not at home
• heating automations adapting to the weather report, presence, time and user preset

my future idea is to copy a nuki opener with an esp-32.

In Progress, needs tweaking:
Making sure our AC only turns on when it can efficiently cool the house. Useful when we dip into the 50’s for lows while it’s 70’s+ during the day. Basically switch the thermostat to heat only to avoid the AC coming on.

In the planning stage:
Presence sensing in our bathroom to turn the light on for my dad in the middle of the night. Can’t use PIR motion detection as my dad moves very slow these days and actually defeats the PIR sensor in our hallway night light. I’m thinking mmWave is the way to go. Might try presence sensing when someone is on the toilet, turn the fan on, again, because sometimes he forgets.

Just getting started really with automations right now.