4 common Home Assistant mistakes that silently break your automations

Conflicting automation conditions occur when multiple automations have overlapping or contradictory logic that causes them to interfere with each other. This can result in automations failing to trigger or executing unexpectedly without obvious error messages. To prevent this, users should carefully review the conditions in each automation to ensure they don't contradict one another, use the traces feature in Home Assistant to debug what actually happened during automation execution, and simplify automation logic by separating triggers and conditions properly so that if one fails, it can be identified quickly.

When entities (individual devices or sensors) become unavailable—such as when a device loses connection, is renamed during an integration update, or goes offline—automations that reference those entities may fail to execute without generating visible error messages. This is particularly problematic when device names change unexpectedly, such as when switching between different integrations for the same device type. To mitigate this issue, use proxy variables instead of direct entity references, maintain consistent naming conventions from the start, regularly check Home Assistant logs for integration errors and unavailable entities, and test automations before deploying them to ensure they reference valid entities.