5 Home Assistant Community Store (HACS) Integrations You Should Try

One of the biggest reasons I love Home Assistant is because of all the ecosystems and devices it integrates with. Did you know Home Assistant has many community-developed integrations in the Home Assistant Community Store (HACS)? In this article, we’ll give an overview HACS and mention five integrations you should try.

HACS Overview

HACS is a powerful extension for Home Assistant, designed to streamline the process of discovering and installing custom components, themes, and integrations created by the Home Assistant community. It acts as a central hub for community-driven content, allowing users to enhance their Home Assistant setup with unique functionalities and visually appealing themes that are not available in the default setup. HACS gives users access to a vast library, ranging from integrations and automation blueprints to advanced UI customizations.

HACS itself is an integration that can be installed directly into Home Assistant. The store categorizes integrations, plugins, and themes. Once installed, Home Assistant users can easily find what they need directly from their Home Assistant user interface. HACS also allows you to keep it and the integrations you install from it up-to-date.

The Watchman

The Watchman is a powerful Home Assistant integration that checks all of your services and entities and reports those that are missing or not available. This information helps Home Assistant troubleshoot and even proactively fix problems in their installation.

Automations and scripts will often stop working properly if entities they rely upon become unavailable. Often, you won’t immediately know that an automation stopped working or why it did. But, proactively knowing that entities your scripts and automations rely on aren’t available makes it easier to identify and fix problems quickly.

The Watchmen has reports you can customize and view on demand. It also can send notifications so you can be aware of potential problems immediately. Here is an example of a report you can create with the Markdown card in Home Assistant:

Alarmo

I have an alarm system for my home that works with the service Alarm.com. For that, I use the Alarm.com integration provided by HACS to work in conjunction with the rest of my Home Assistant security automations. If I didn’t have an alarm system, however, I would use the Alarmo integration.

In addition to my alarm system, I have all kinds of motion and door sensors around my home that could be combined to make a good alarm system. I could write a whole bunch of automations to accomplish this, but Alarmo takes care of all that for you.

Alarmo will tie all those sensors together and create a virtual alarm control panel without you having to write a line of YAML code. Like a traditional alarm system, it allows you to set up arming modes (e.g., home, away) and set up different behaviors (which sensors are active, entry and exit delays, etc.) based on the alarm mode. You can even set up multiple users with multiple PIN codes for arming/disarming the alarm and sectioning your home into different alarm zones. It’s powerful and convenient!

Battery Notes

I’ve got tons of battery-powered sensors around my house. Most of my door, motion, flood, tilt, and other sensors are all battery-powered. The Battery Notes integration allows you to keep your battery status up-to-date. This integration lets you easily keep track of the type of batteries your devices have, when you last changed them, and what their charging status is.

This integration usually doesn’t take a lot of setup, as it auto-discovers most battery-powered devices in your setup. Keeping track of and changing the batteries of my portable sensors is my least favorite part of using them, but this integration takes some of the sting out of the maintenance.

Presence Simulation

In case you haven’t figured it out, a large part of what I do with my smart home is make my home more secure. Presence Simulation helps with this by using my smart devices to mimic that we are home when we are not. This deters potential thieves because they will believe someone is in the house.

How does it work? It looks in your Home Assistant database for the history of how various entities have been used. Then you can set it to use those same entities at the same times for the same amounts of times even when you are way, truly indicating that you are present.

It can perform this trick by turning lights on and off, setting smart bulb colors, and even opening and closing covers (e.g., curtains and blinds). Sound is a powerful deterrent for thieves, and you can use this integration to control media players in your Home Assistant installation as well.

If it can be turned on or turned off in Home Assistant, this integration can use it.

Alexa Media Player

Alexa Media Player is a must-have if you have Alexa devices around your house. It does a lot more than controlling music on Alexa devices. The integration works a lot, like the Alexa app. It allows Home Assistant to play custom text messages and media files directly to your Alexa devices. Most importantly, you can send commands to an Alexa device as if you were speaking to it!

You can learn more about what it can do in its wiki.

Final thoughts

Home Assistant comes packed with official integrations, but the fun doesn’t stop there. Make sure you also take a look in HACS to add even more power to your Home Assistant setup.

What are your favorite HACS integrations? Let me know in the comments or on X (Twitter).