this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2026
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I would expect it to behave like all other smart home systems, or like a physical dimmer switch/power switch.
Dim the lights that are already on, and ignore the ones that are off?
I'm just pointing out here that you and I have different expectations; how could the software know what you intended?
99% of the time I want to adjust the current lighting, I don't want to first turn on all lights and then adjust all of those lights to a uniform standard before individually toggling them all individually. Powering on all unpowered lights when adjusting brightness should be the edge case, IMO (also again not just my opinion, but the industry standard)
For the record all other smart home systems treat room groups the way I am describing (like a dimmer knob and power switches). But there isn't even an option in HA for rooms to "only adjust devices currently in use". The smart home companies seem to have researched how people naturally intuit such things.
If you're adjusting the same lights repeatedly, you could set them up as a group.
It's more work, but you could also write a script that detects the current status of each light then sets the brightness if it's on. I use something like that for our smart porch lights that are on a smart switch - if the switch is off, turn it on, wait a bit for the lights to get on the network, then set them to the right color or whatever. (The switch normally stays on, but it gets turned off occasionally and it doesn't automatically turn on after a power outage.)
I haven't used other automation systems - I avoided them because I didn't want to get locked into one, until I found HA. I also have never thought to "dim a room" - actually I've never used entire room controls at all, they never made a lot of sense to me, but then I generally only have one or two lights in a room to control.
The conversation topic was unintuitive aspects of HA, I'm aware hacky workarounds exist, but I find this (pretty central) behavior quite clunky.
I also find it crazy that you've never wanted to dim or brighten more than one light at a time lol but then again, diversity is the spice of FOSS!