Home Assistant

Common tasks - installation independent

This section provides tasks that do not depend on a specific Home Assistant installation type or a specific integration. They may be referenced in other procedures.

Enabling or disabling elements

Some entities are disabled by default. To enable them, follow these steps:

  1. In Home Assistant, open the table of interest.

  2. Enable multiselect and select all the entities you want to enable or disable.

  3. In the top right corner, select the three dots menu, then select Enable or Disable.

    Screenshot showing how to enable or disable multiple automations

Related topics

Defining a custom polling interval

Creating an automation for polling gives you more flexibility on when to poll.

Why use an automation instead of changing the integration’s configuration for polling?

  1. Not all integrations have a configurable polling interval. The homassistant.update_entity service on the other hand works with most of the integrations, no code changes required.
  2. An automation allows you to poll whenever you want. For example, if you have a rate-limited solar panel provider with a maximum number of requests per day, you may want to lower/stop the polling at night but poll more frequently during the day.

If you want to define a specific interval at which your device is being polled for data, you can disable the default polling interval and create your own polling automation.

To add the automation:

  1. Go to Settings > Devices & Services, and select your integration.
  2. On the integration entry, select the three dots.
    • Then, select System options and toggle the button to disable polling. Disable polling for updates
  3. To define your custom polling interval, create an automation.
  4. Save your new automation to poll for data.