Happy Halloween! This post is about the smart home gadgets I’ve added to my Holiday decoration tool set. Paired with Home Assistant for ultimate smarts and automation, this has made decorating the house super easy around holiday time.

Holiday lighting is one of the easiest ways to get your house ready for the holidays quickly. If done right, you can have your house set up and colorized in minutes (or even automatically!). In our house we use a combination of DIY LED Strips outside the house, Hue lights, 433hmz Etekcity outlets and GE Outdoor switches to control the landscape lighting. We even have the Skybell Doorbell in the mix!

Using Home Assistant, I have a holiday script that will check each day to see if it’s a holiday and if so, will look up a predefined scene and color the house appropriately. We control the landscape lighting to make sure they turn on at sunset and off at sunrise automatically adjusting appropriately throughout the year. We make sure to put non lit decoration items near the landscape lights to illuminate them at night. Inside the house, the 433 MHz Radio Frequency outlets are an easy and inexpensive way to control all the window decorations as well as decoration and lighting throughout the house. These RF outlets have incredible range and are really inexpensive.

Check out the video below for a more in depth look at all the holiday lighting at the house and a review of the yaml code from my repo.

Have a Happy Halloween!

–Carlo