You pair the device to a base station once to create an entity but you don't have to if you know the mac of your phone. So there's no pairing involved in the tracking.

You can use the HA app to create a beacon on your phone when you're on your home WiFi and not pair anything, just plumb the id into HA.

The speed is quite fast but there is still a lot of false positives. I've sat and watched mine and my wife's phones just pinging around the house, but if you add some "for X seconds" to your automations it becomes much more stable.

I've got 3 android phones and an iPhone tracked at present

I already have motion sensors everywhere but I also have cats. They make it seem like there's people wandering around the house all the time.

I've placed a lot of them on top of door frames that seem to miss the cats, but in the front room there's sofas for them to climb up on which means they still get picked up.

I have also since this post purchased MMwave sensors. But they're worse for picking up the cats.

So what I'm trying to do is add more sensors so HA has a better picture of who is in the house, and when.

To give you an idea, yesterday I took my wife to a Dr appointment, my kids are at their grandparents, but when I was sat on the car waiting for Wifey I noticed my kitchen lights were on in the app.

The Drs turned into the hospital and I was out for a good 4 hours, but got home and added "Is anyone home?" to my lights automations.

The cats don't need lights

The secret is not caring it's 4m away as long as it says you're closest to that one. It's not accurate, it's a guess made with software.

As I've said I've sat at my PC on the front room and watched it say I'm in my bedroom and kitchen.

So for example my front room lights are based around an input boolean. They're triggered on by motion but back off by whether the TV is on, my wife's laptop is connected to the WiFi, the pc is switched off, and everyone's presence is not in the front room. I already did all that and now I have presence as well.

It used to be that my wife would be sat there on her phone and the lights would go out, now because her phone is on her person they stay on.

Like I say, they're not perfect but they are better than not having them.

I don't think I'll ever have my music follow me around the house.

Oh also try instead of basing automations around whether you are in a room, instead use "is not"

So for example when I get out of bed and get up for work by bedroom lights come on with my alarm. When I go downstairs and make a brew I am no longer in the bedroom so my automations turn off the lights in there. Is not "bedroom"

It's triggered by the motion sensor outside my bedroom door, then it waits for my presence to be anything other than bedroom. Since I'm moving around the house it'll trigger at some point.

Similarly my sleep automation turns off when the bedroom is no longer occupied. But that's when my wife gets up 2 hours after me. It's also triggered by motion, but then waits until my bedroom presence sensor no longer reads anything

So ninjas could sneak in along as they don't use bluetooth?

Bluetooth or wifi, depending on the number of accesspoints..

Anyway, a really smart hack!

Yup espresence

The insulation on an oven is 10x that of an air fryer.

…. And sometimes air fryers don’t turn off.

An oven is usually designed to last a decade, an air fryer sometimes only lasts a year.

VERY different build quality standards.

Of course, depends on the oven and the air fryer. Modern ovens have timers and even whole programs.

Oh neat. I don't think my smart plugs show power consumption.

Thanks for the re-upvote. My guess is it was someone who sets timers on their phone. 😂

Dammit, now you've got my head swimming with ways to improve the washing machine stuff. I bet a vibration sensor on top could be combined with the smart plug power monitoring to detect when it's being emptied.

How did you do the Google-turning-on-the-smartplug thing? I feel like I'm missing a lot of tricks by not having HA integrated into those. I just use them for audible notifications currently.