👻 Ghost Mode for Home Assistant

Make an empty house look lived-in — by replaying how your home actually behaves, not dumb on/off timers.

Warning

Alpha. Ghost Mode learns and replays — it will switch real lights in your house. It only does that while switch.ghost_mode is on and your alarm says away. Leave the switch off and it stays read-only.

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The idea

Classic presence simulation flips a few lights on a fixed timer — obvious to anyone watching for a few evenings. Ghost Mode learns the real rhythm of your home from history: which lights, when the covers move, when the TV runs. Then it replays that with natural variation while you are away.

1. Learn — from recorder history. Nothing to configure, nothing to record.
2. Arm — when the switch is on and the alarm says away.
3. Replay — a realistic evening, at slightly different times each day.
4. Yield — stop the moment someone comes home, and tidy up after itself.

It adds four entities:

Entity	What it is for
switch.ghost_mode	Allow replay. On its own it does nothing until the alarm agrees.
switch.ghost_mode_force_replay	Replay now, whatever the alarm says.
binary_sensor.ghost_mode_replaying	Whether it is performing right now, and why not if it isn't.
sensor.ghost_mode_learned_rhythm	What it has learned.

Requirements

• Home Assistant 2025.8 or newer
• The recorder (on by default). Ghost Mode reads it and nothing else.

Installation

Until it is in HACS, add it as a custom repository:

1. HACS → ⋮ → Custom repositories
2. https://github.com/MarcelHoell/ha-ghost-mode, category Integration
3. Install, restart Home Assistant.
4. Settings → Devices & Services → + Add Integration → Ghost Mode.

There is nothing to fill in. It finds your lights, switches, covers and media players by itself and starts learning tonight.

Give it a day or two to learn something, then flip switch.ghost_mode_force_replay to watch it perform on demand — no alarm, no waiting for you to leave.

Configuration

Settings → Devices & Services → Ghost Mode → Configure.

Option	What it does
Alarm that means the house is empty	Replay runs only while this is armed_away or armed_vacation, and stops the moment it is disarmed. Leave empty to let the switch decide on its own.
Replay may switch these	Which kinds of thing replay may command. Defaults to lights and switches. Tick covers or media players deliberately — a cover physically moves and a television really powers up.
Never learn or replay these	Entities to ignore completely.
Paste entity IDs to exclude	Bulk version of the above — paste a list instead of clicking each one.

What gets found automatically

Lights, switches, fans, covers, media players and input booleans — anything whose on/off state is visible from the street.

Skipped without asking: disabled and hidden entities, anything Home Assistant marks as a config or diagnostic entity (all those "LED indicator" and "child lock" switches), members of a group when the group itself is learned, and Ghost Mode's own entities.

The exclusion list matters

Most homes have several entities for one physical thing — a television is easily eight, a room of Hue bulbs five. Learning the same lamp five times doesn't improve anything, and replaying it means five commands to one bulb.

Use the paste box and drop in a list, one per line or comma separated:

light.office_left, light.office_right
media_player.tv_screen
switch.vacuum_uv_lamp

Anything shaped like an entity ID is picked up, so pasting a bulleted or quoted list works too. It merges into the list above and is not kept, so reopening the form shows one list rather than two.

Permanently-on device settings — a robot vacuum's UV lamp, say — are the other thing worth excluding. Home Assistant doesn't always mark them as settings, so Ghost Mode can't tell them from a real lamp.

Replay

Replay runs while both are true: switch.ghost_mode is on, and the alarm says away. Learning happens either way, regardless of either switch.

Or force it. switch.ghost_mode_force_replay overrides everything — alarm, master switch, the lot — and replays until you switch it back off. Use it to watch what replay actually does before trusting it, or when you are away without having armed anything. It is the manual override, so it wins on purpose.

It is not a schedule. A light that was on for 60% of your observed Tuesday evenings comes on about 60% of Tuesdays — not every Tuesday at the same minute. Times drift by up to 20 minutes, so the house doesn't light up all at once.

Coming home: the moment the alarm disarms or the switch goes off, replay stops and undoes its own changes only. Anything you or another automation changed meanwhile is left alone.

It won't fight your automations — one command per entity per half hour, so if a motion automation switches a replayed light back off, it stays off. And it never learns from itself: days it ran are skipped by the learner.

A card to control it

Nothing extra to install — replay is part of the integration. The usual setup is to leave the switch on permanently and let the alarm decide, so the switch means "Ghost Mode may act" and the alarm means "the house is empty".

type: entities
title: Ghost Mode
entities:
  - entity: switch.ghost_mode
    name: Enabled
  - entity: switch.ghost_mode_force_replay
    name: Force replay now
  - entity: binary_sensor.ghost_mode_replaying
    name: Performing right now
  - type: attribute
    entity: binary_sensor.ghost_mode_replaying
    attribute: waiting_for
    name: Idle because
  - type: attribute
    entity: binary_sensor.ghost_mode_replaying
    attribute: entities_held
    name: Lights it is holding
  - entity: alarm_control_panel.home
    name: Alarm
  - entity: sensor.ghost_mode_learned_rhythm
    name: Entities with a rhythm
  - type: attribute
    entity: sensor.ghost_mode_learned_rhythm
    attribute: last_learned_day
    name: Last day learned

Swap alarm_control_panel.home for your own panel.

binary_sensor.ghost_mode_replaying is the honest answer to "is it doing anything?" — on only while replay is actually driving. When it is off, waiting_for says why in plain words ("the Ghost Mode switch is off", "alarm_control_panel.home is disarmed"), and it is None while running, so you can trigger a notification off it:

trigger:
  - platform: state
    entity_id: binary_sensor.ghost_mode_replaying
    to: "on"
action:
  - service: notify.mobile_app
    data:
      message: >
        Ghost Mode has taken over the house.

restores_on_return lists exactly what it will put back when you get home.

Seeing what it learned

On a dashboard

Add a Markdown card — no custom card, nothing to install:

type: markdown
content: |
  {% set sensor = 'sensor.ghost_mode_learned_rhythm' %}
  {% set rhythm = state_attr(sensor, 'rhythm') %}
  {% if rhythm %}
  ### Learned rhythm
  Last full day learned: **{{ state_attr(sensor, 'last_learned_day') }}**
  {% for entity, week in rhythm.items() %}
  **{{ entity }}**
  ```text
       0h    3h    6h    9h    12h   15h   18h   21h
  {% for day, bars in week.items() %}{{ day }}  {{ bars }}
  {% endfor %}```
  {% endfor %}
  {% else %}
  ### Learned rhythm
  _Nothing to draw yet._ Call `ghost_mode.learn_now`, then check
  **Settings → System → Logs**.
  {% endif %}

Which draws:

**light.wohnzimmer**
     0h    3h    6h    9h    12h   15h   18h   21h
Mon  ········································▃█████▁·
Tue  ············································▁█▃·
Wed  (never seen)

How to read it

One row per weekday, one character per half hour, midnight on the left. The character says how much of that half hour the thing was on:

·	never on
▁	briefly — a couple of minutes
▃ ▅	a third, to three-quarters
█	the whole half hour
(never seen)	that weekday hasn't been observed yet

So the Monday row above reads: living room light on around 20:00, solid until 23:00, off by 23:30.

Each row is an average over every time that weekday has been seen, not one particular day. Entities that never vary — off all week, or a setting that's on all week — are left out of the card entirely.

As a file

Settings → Devices & Services → Ghost Mode → ⋮ → Download diagnostics gives you the same picture as a file, plus a list of entities Ghost Mode can see but has no history for. That's the one to attach to a bug report.

Services

Service	What it does
ghost_mode.learn_now	Read history in now, instead of waiting for the nightly run at 03:17.
ghost_mode.forget	Throw the profile away and rebuild it from scratch. Use after an update changes how the profile is measured.

Removing the integration deletes the stored profile too, so removing and re-adding really does start over.

If something looks wrong

Replay isn't doing anything. Look at binary_sensor.ghost_mode_replaying. Its waiting_for attribute says why in plain words — the switch is off, the alarm is disarmed, or the alarm entity is unavailable. To rule the alarm out entirely, switch on switch.ghost_mode_force_replay.

It's performing, but nothing visible happens. Check the card: if today's row is mostly ·, there is genuinely nothing to reproduce at this hour. Replay does not invent activity that was never there.

Nothing appears on the card. The profile only fills in after the learner has run once. Call ghost_mode.learn_now, then check Settings → System → Logs and filter for ghost_mode — it says plainly whether it learned, found no history, or failed.

"Nothing to learn" in the log. Expected. Only complete days are learned, so a second run on the same day has nothing to do.

A row is blank on one weekday. That weekday hasn't been observed yet, or you were out. A fresh profile can be confidently wrong about a day you happened to be away — it corrects itself over a few weeks.

Give it time. Recorder only keeps about ten days, so the profile is built up gradually rather than read in one go. Expect a couple of weeks before it really knows your evenings.

Development

python tests/test_rhythm.py    # the maths, no Home Assistant needed
pip install pytest-homeassistant-custom-component && pytest -q

No dependencies, no build step. See CLAUDE.md for how the internals fit together.

Disclaimer

Presence simulation is a deterrent, not a security guarantee. Use alongside real measures.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.