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Sensor House

Sensor House

From a reading to a notice

What happens between a sensor noticing something and your phone buzzing, and how to put a recipe from this site into Home Assistant.

A sensor reads the room. A radio carries the reading to Home Assistant. An automation decides whether the reading matters. Then you get a notice. Every recipe on this site is one automation: a trigger that watches one sensor, sometimes a condition, and the actions to take. To use one, rename the entities in it to match your own devices, then paste it into automations.yaml or into a new automation's YAML editor.

Four steps, every time

  1. Sensor: reads the room.
  2. Radio: carries the reading.
  3. Automation: decides.
  4. You: get the notice.

Find your sensor's name

Every device in Home Assistant shows up as one or more entities, each with an id like binary_sensor.water_heater_leak. Open the device in Settings, find the entity, and copy its id. The recipes here start with placeholder names; change them to yours.

Paste the recipe

  1. Create a new automation, open its menu and switch to editing in YAML.
  2. Paste the recipe, minus the leading dash and the indent if the editor wants a single automation.
  3. Or add the recipe, dash and all, to the end of automations.yaml and reload automations.
  4. Change the notify action to your own phone. The Home Assistant phone app adds one named for your device.

Then test it

Wet the leak sensor with a damp paper towel, breathe on the humidity sensor, or open the garage door and wait. A recipe you have not watched fire once is a recipe you are hoping works.

Ready? Open the recipe bench.

Sources

  1. Home Assistant: Automation triggers Home Assistant
  2. Home Assistant: Numeric state trigger Home Assistant
  3. Home Assistant: Notifications Home Assistant

Drafted with a language model on October 26, 2026 from the sources listed above. Every recipe on the page is written by the site's own code and parsed by a test. The editor samples pages after they publish; nothing here is advice from a licensed electrician or plumber.

Found an error? See Corrections.

From a reading to a notice | Sensor House