Monitoring Smart Home Device Battery Levels with Home Assistant

In this video, I cover how to download and install the custom battery card, two required sensors for monitoring, as well as an automation to alert you when a device has a low battery.
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HACS: • Home Assistant startin...
Mushroom cards: • How to create a Home A...
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battery card configuration code:
---
type: custom:battery-state-card
color_gradient:
- '#ff0000'
- '#ffff00'
- '#00ff00'
entities:
- entity: sensor.my_device_battery
name: My Sensor
---
Mushroom template card code:
Icon:
---
{% if is_state('binary_sensor.devices_with_low_battery', 'on') %}
mdi:battery-10
{% else %}
mdi:battery
{% endif %}
---
Icon Color:
---
{% if is_state('binary_sensor.devices_with_low_battery', 'on') %}
red
{% endif %}
---
sensor:
- platform: template
sensors:
devices_with_low_battery:
friendly_name: 'Devices with low battery'
unit_of_measurement: devices
value_template: ＞-
{% set ignore_entities = ['sensor.device1_battery_level','sensor.device2_battery_level'] %}
{{ states.sensor
| selectattr('attributes.device_class', 'eq', 'battery')
| rejectattr('entity_id', 'in', ignore_entities)
| map(attribute='state')
| map('int', -1) | select('le', 10)
| list | count
}}
icon_template: ＞-
{% if is_state('sensor.devices_with_low_battery', '0') %}
mdi:check-circle
{% else %}
mdi:battery-alert
{% endif %}
binary_sensor:
- platform: threshold
entity_id: sensor.devices_with_low_battery
name: Devices with low battery
upper: 0.5
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[@arthurkazanis4283]

Great video. Accurate and to the point. I also learnt some stuff on template cards. Love your work Jeff.

[@fasthowto]

Thank you for the kind words, and thanks for watching!

[@KozakPlus]

Really usefull, concise and exciting videos from Mr. Jeff. Thank you a lot and greetings from Ukraine

[@fasthowto]

Many thanks, glad you are enjoying the videos! Thank you for watching!

[@OutdoorDreamsHunt]

Love watching this content just for the shirt messages 😂

[@fasthowto]

LOL Thank you!!

[@killerx4307]

Nice video.. You are the reason that make me to convert my home to a Smart Home.. and you are a true smart home solver!

[@fasthowto]

Thank you so much for the kind words! I'm so happy to hear that my videos are helpful. :) thanks for watching!

[@DanBrown1010]

Excellent work! Earned my sub!!

[@fasthowto]

Thank you so much for the kind words, and thank you for watching - and for the sub! :)

[@Hupihovi]

Good job man! Man of your word ;)

[@fasthowto]

Thank you! It actually shipped this morning. Been a bear of a week at my day job. Do you have any creative ideas for giving away these two Fire 10 tablets I've still got? Doesn't look like those guys are going to come forward any time soon... LOL

[@RandomTorok]

I am working on a couple of devices that are basically thermometers. One will be a weather station that I will put outside and it will record temperature, humidity and barometric pressure. I've got it running on an TTGO T-Dislplay and powered by 2 18650 batterys. I have a 4056 charger connect to the battery and the device with a small solar panel connect to the charger. I'm not sure that the small solar panel is sufficient to power the device as well as charge the battery. My dashboard card currently shows the temperature, humidity, pressure as well as battery voltage and battery level. What I'd really like is a battery state that shows charging or discharging. The dashboard card for my phone has this field. Would you know how I can add battery state for my weather station?

[@frankraym]

My other question as well is if I have another device that goes low battery will I get notified ? Since the automation from the beginning of the video has when it goes from off to on. But if you have already a low battery it stays on and when another device would get low battery it won't switch from off to on....unless I don't fully understand

[@fasthowto]

Great question! Your understanding ia correct. If you want multiple notifications, you'd need to add additional sensors and rewrite the automation, or you'd need to notify based on each device individually. I have WAY too many devices for that. (In fact, you'll see the same logic in my upcoming video on environment change notifications). Since I keep batteries for everything on hand, when I get a notification, I look at the batteries view and see what device needs batteries. Then I go replace them, and I'm back to green and the red light on the card on the dashboard turns off. No idea why you would let one device sit there long enough with a near-dead battery that a second would also go into that state - but regardless, if it happens it should easily be seen on the batteries view by the red battery icon in a sea of otherwise green/yellow. Thanks for watching!

[@JeffAycan]

I may have missed the obvious, but what percentage dictates a "low battery"?

[@fasthowto]

Sorry about that! Line 103 in config yaml. Great question, and thanks for watching!

[@JeffAycan]

@@fasthowto Thanks, I was thinking that but figured I'd ask first. The absolutely crazy part is, my line 103 coincidently happens to be the same as your line 103. Who'd have thought they'd line up with completely separate systems.

[@travismailsa1]

Thanks, once configured how do you set a homeassistant notification to notify you when a battery is at or below a certain level?

[@fasthowto]

Did you watch the video?

[@travismailsa1]

@@fasthowto shot for the reply, I did watch the entire video yes. And setup exactly as shown just modified the sensors/batteries I want monitored.

[@fasthowto]

@@travismailsa1 OK, cool. Perhaps I didn't understand what you were asking then? Could you try to explain what you'd like to do in a little greater detail?

[@travismailsa1]

I have the exact same setup now as per the video, what i am wanting is Homeassistant to push a notification to my Wifes mobile phone when her cell battery hits below 50% for example to put it on charge. She is famous for not charging her phone and this has caused majour issues when emergencies have occured. So i am wandering now how i could possibly create a trigger for the setup provided in the current video. Currently we receive no notifications when either our batteries are low. Both our phones are currently low now on the Battery dash i created like your. configuration.yaml is setup exactly like yours excluding the ignore entities

[@travismailsa1]

@@fasthowto Hi There, just an update, i managed to create automations to do what i wanted via the battery entity and a blueprint to notify me when a battery reaches 50% then 40% and finally 30%. Thank your for your responses though.

[@akhosha2]

My configuration.yaml file already contains a sensor: key and it will not let me add the code per your instructions. What am i missing here?

[@fasthowto]

If you already have a sensor key, just add the rest of the code below that. The sensor key in the video is to tell you what section to add it to, you cannot have multiple keys of the same type.

[@MadMike78]

I don't have the same settings as you do for the alert trigger to send a notification. Do i need to install something?

[@fasthowto]

Do you have the companion app installed on your phone?

[@frankraym]

Update : so I got the template in I got the yaml file in but when I go to make an automation it shows the sensor as off. Now it's my understanding that it will only show the checkmark once a device becomes low battery. So I went into developer tools and change the state of a battery to see if it would turn the binary all batteries sensor to on......nothing happened 😢.... So is there something I'm missing ?!

[@fasthowto]

Hard for me to say if you're missing something without being able to see what you've done, so... My first question though would be did you reload the config and/or reboot?

[@frankraym]

​@@fasthowto ok it was my fault I had an extra spacing in yaml config. Now my next question would be why is it always showing as 1 device with low battery ?

[@fasthowto]

It automatically checks everything with a battery in your system. Go to your entities, and type "battery" in the search bar. There you'll find what the device is, and if you don't want to track that device, you can add it to the exclusions in the config. As mentioned in the video, I ignore phones and tablets and stuff like that. I don't need an alert every time my wife's phone dies. 😂

[@frankraym]

@@fasthowto ok thank you for that quick response. Is it normal to always show 1 low battery even though in the dashboard all my batteries are higher than 30 %?

[@frankraym]

@@fasthowto is the binary sensor always supposed to go on ,off on off since as you mentioned it checks the batteries automatically?