Home Assistant Vacation Lighting: A Simple Away Routine

Use a small routine you can stop easily

For Home Assistant vacation lighting, begin with a few existing lamps and an explicit on/off control. Use a fixed schedule if that meets your needs; add modest randomness if you want some variation. You do not need to install an app or replay your entire household’s activity just to vary two lamps.

The example here runs from 6 pm until 11 pm. At each half-hour, it waits a randomly chosen zero to five minutes, turns on one of two lamps, and turns the other off. It can choose the same lamp again, so a visible change is not guaranteed every time. At 11 pm it requests both off. Ending Vacation lighting also requests both off once, then leaves normal control alone.

Choose spare living-room and bedroom lamps that nobody depends on for safe movement. Tell a sitter or returning household member to turn the toggle off before using those lamps normally. The example does not detect people or restore earlier brightness settings.

Researched from current Home Assistant documentation and the linked project documentation on September 16, 2026. The two-lamp schedule is an illustrative configuration. The configuration was validated with Home Assistant 2026.9.2, and its action logic was checked in an isolated engine with simulated lamp services and time. This did not test live trigger scheduling or physical devices. The cover is an AI-generated residential illustration.

1. Choose a schedule, random routine, or history replay

Our practical default is the native example below when you want two lamps and behavior you can inspect. Choose a larger tool only when its extra controls solve a specific need.

On a small screen, swipe the table sideways to read every column.

For history replay, confirm that the chosen days contain ordinary lighting activity. Do not delete existing history as a setup step. Keep the selection to lamps even if a tool also supports covers, switches, or media players. Neither a saved history nor a running simulation proves that a command reached a real device.

2. Pick the lamps and create the toggle

1. Check normal control first. Turn each chosen lamp on and off from Home Assistant. Keep a physical control available and leave smart bulbs powered so they can receive commands.
2. Find the two entity IDs. An entity is Home Assistant’s individual control or reading. Open each lamp’s entity settings and note its ID, such as light.living_room_lamp. This recipe requires two light. entities; a switch. entity cannot be pasted into a light.turn_on action unchanged.
3. Create the helper. Open Settings → Devices & services → Helpers → Create helper → Toggle. Name it Vacation lighting, confirm its ID is input_boolean.vacation_lighting, and add it to your dashboard. Leave it off during setup.
4. Reserve these lamps for the routine while it is on. Prevent ordinary motion or bedtime routines from sending competing commands to the same lamps during Vacation lighting. Check vendor-app schedules too. Keep other household controls and safety systems independent.

The Toggle helper normally restores its previous state after a restart; an explicitly configured YAML initial value changes that behavior. A helper is just a saved setting—it does not control lamps until an automation reads it.

If you already use a whole-home Vacation state, decide how it should control this dedicated lighting toggle and document that relationship. Do not introduce a second competing definition of who is home. Our house-modes guide explains the difference between a deliberate trip mode and ordinary Home/Away tracking.

3. Add the two-lamp automation

Go to Settings → Automations & scenes → Create automation → Create new automation. Open its menu, choose Edit in YAML, and replace the new automation’s contents with the following. YAML is the text form of the editor; preserve its indentation.

Replace every occurrence of both lamp IDs, including the quoted IDs inside the templates. If your helper has a different ID, replace that everywhere too. These are ordinary light.turn_on and light.turn_off commands; the routine does not require dimming or color support.

alias: Vacation lighting - two lamps
description: Random evening lamp choice with an explicit stop
triggers:
  - trigger: time_pattern
    minutes: "/30"
    id: tick
  - trigger: time
    at: "23:00:00"
    id: bedtime
  - trigger: state
    entity_id: input_boolean.vacation_lighting
    from: "off"
    to: "on"
    id: enabled
  - trigger: state
    entity_id: input_boolean.vacation_lighting
    from: "on"
    to: "off"
    id: disabled
  - trigger: homeassistant
    event: start
    id: startup
conditions: []
actions:
  - choose:
      - conditions:
          - condition: state
            entity_id: input_boolean.vacation_lighting
            state: "on"
          - condition: time
            after: "18:00:00"
            before: "23:00:00"
        sequence:
          - delay:
              minutes: "{{ range(0, 6) | random }}"
          - condition: state
            entity_id: input_boolean.vacation_lighting
            state: "on"
          - condition: time
            after: "18:00:00"
            before: "23:00:00"
          - variables:
              chosen: >-
                {{ ['light.living_room_lamp',
                    'light.bedroom_lamp'] | random }}
          - action: light.turn_on
            target:
              entity_id: "{{ chosen }}"
          - action: light.turn_off
            target:
              entity_id: >-
                {{ 'light.bedroom_lamp'
                   if chosen == 'light.living_room_lamp'
                   else 'light.living_room_lamp' }}
    default:
      - if:
          - condition: or
            conditions:
              - condition: state
                entity_id: input_boolean.vacation_lighting
                state: "on"
              - condition: trigger
                id: disabled
        then:
          - action: light.turn_off
            target:
              entity_id:
                - light.living_room_lamp
                - light.bedroom_lamp
mode: restart

The times use Home Assistant’s configured time zone. To change the window, update both after values, both before values, and the bedtime trigger’s at value. This example uses 6 pm even if the sun has not set. Pick hours that suit your home before enabling it.

minutes: "/30" means the clock’s :00 and :30 marks, not 30 minutes after the last run. The range’s upper bound is excluded, so range(0, 6) gives delays from zero through five minutes. The random lamp choice is saved once in chosen; both actions use that same choice.

Leave the automation enabled. Use the Vacation lighting helper to end the trip. Disabling the automation itself stops its processing; it does not run this recipe’s lamp-off cleanup. The restart mode stops a pending run when a new trigger arrives, including switching the helper off. The empty top-level conditions: [] lets the stop trigger reach the cleanup branch. The on/off and time checks belong inside the actions, as shown. These behaviors follow Home Assistant’s run-mode documentation and script syntax.

At 11 pm the time window is closed: Home Assistant treats the start time as inclusive and the end as exclusive. The explicit bedtime trigger and the half-hour trigger may both fire then; both lead to the same off request.

4. Check the expected behavior

This is a worked example of the logic, not a record of measured device responses. Assume both lamps are reachable and no other routine controls them.

On a small screen, swipe the table sideways to read every column.

While the toggle remains on outside the evening window, half-hour checks request both lamps off again. This is intentional for dedicated vacation lamps. Turn the toggle off before using them normally during the day. A lamp unavailable during an off request may remain on; the next scheduled check is only another attempt, not a guarantee.

A server restart discards an in-progress wait. The startup trigger starts fresh. Reloading automations also interrupts an active run, but does not fire the startup trigger; the next half-hour check handles the current state. If the helper is off after downtime, the routine deliberately leaves existing lamp states alone—check them manually if the earlier stop command could not be delivered.

5. Rehearse before leaving

1. Use only the two non-essential lamps. Keep normal room lighting on while testing. For a daytime rehearsal, temporarily set both copies of the start/end window to include at least the next ten minutes, and set the bedtime trigger to that same temporary end time.
2. Test the start. Turn Vacation lighting on and allow up to five minutes. One selected lamp should be on and the other off. Open the automation’s Traces—its record of each run—to see the delay, chosen lamp, and actions.
3. Test cancellation. For a repeatable check, temporarily replace the random delay with minutes: 1. Save, turn the helper off and on, then off during that minute. Both lamps should turn off, and neither should turn on when the minute expires.
4. Test the actual cutoff. Turn the helper on within your temporary window and let the end time pass naturally. Both lamps should turn off. With the helper off afterward, turn a lamp on normally and verify the next half-hour check leaves it alone.
5. Restore the final settings. Put back the random delay and all five time values. Leave the helper off until the house is ready. Show another household member where to stop it.

Home Assistant’s Run actions command skips triggers and top-level conditions. It can help inspect this recipe’s internal branches, but cannot prove that the time trigger or off event works. Use the real helper changes and cutoff rehearsal above. Check startup behavior during your next planned maintenance restart rather than interrupting the home just for a lighting test.

If the lights do something unexpected

On a small screen, swipe the table sideways to read every column.

For a missed run versus a failed device action, follow our automation troubleshooting checklist. If you want a temporary lighting effect to restore the exact previous state instead of ending with both lamps off, see the recent scene snapshot and restore guide; that is a different behavior from this trip routine.

Keep local operation and security claims separate

The automation runs on your Home Assistant server. For it to control lamps during an internet outage, their integration—the connection between Home Assistant and the devices—must also work locally. A cloud-dependent lamp connection still needs internet. If the server, radio, network, or lamp loses power, commands can fail.

Use this only for selected lighting. Do not include heaters, cooking appliances, locks, garage doors, alarms, or anything whose unattended operation could cause harm. Keep normal security arrangements in place. This guide has not measured whether random lights deter intruders.

A useful handoff is one sentence: “Turn Vacation lighting off before using these lamps; it switches them off once, then leaves them to you.” Tara’s home automation kit with coordinated local routines is the relevant planning path when you want household controls and their exceptions documented together.

Common questions

Do I need HACS or an app for vacation lighting?

No. The two-lamp example uses Home Assistant’s built-in helpers, triggers, conditions and light actions. HACS is an optional community package manager for custom integrations such as Presence Simulation; it is not required for this recipe.

Does this automatically stop when I come home?

No. Turn Vacation lighting off before using the selected lamps normally or having a sitter use them. It cancels a pending run and requests both lamps off once. Automatic arrival detection would need a separate, tested rule that also accounts for visitors.

Will it restore the lights to their previous state?

No. Ending the routine requests both selected lamps off. It does not save their earlier brightness or color, and it leaves them alone on later scheduled checks while the helper is off.

What happens if Home Assistant is down at bedtime?

The routine cannot send an off command while the server is down. When it starts again, it checks the current time and requests both lamps off if Vacation lighting restores on outside the evening window. If the helper is off, check the lamps manually. Device availability still determines whether a command succeeds.