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🏠 Area States

Magic Areas’ primary goal is to understand and track an area’s presence state — that is, whether someone is currently there. But it doesn’t stop there: Magic Areas also monitors a set of secondary states that enrich how automations behave in each area.

🟢 Presence State

For each area you make it magic, Magic Areas does the following:

  1. Scans the area for all associated entities.
  2. Identifies which entities are valid presence sensors (see: Presence Sensing).
  3. Automatically creates a binary sensor entity: binary_sensor.area_{area_id}

This sensor reflects the presence state of the area:

  • When any presence entity enters a presence state (on, home, playing), the area is considered occupied (on).
  • Once all presence entities leave those states, Magic Areas waits for a short delay (configured via Clear Timeout) before marking the area as clear (off).

Note

Magic Areas automatically listen for area changes on entities. Changing an entity's area will cause Magic Areas to reload.

🌙 Secondary States

In addition to presence, Magic Areas tracks a set of secondary states that provide context about the area. These are based on specific configurable entities:

Secondary State Triggered by...
dark/bright Area Light Sensor
sleep Sleep Entity
accented Accent Entity
extended Automatically, after area stays occupied for longer than Extended Time seconds

Secondary states are optional but very useful — especially when layering automations or refining behavior per room.

💡 How Secondary States Are Used

Several Magic Areas features take advantage of these secondary states to fine-tune their behavior:

  • Light Groups Use both presence and secondary states to determine which lights to turn on (e.g. only accent lighting when sleeping or dark).

  • Climate Control Can trigger presets based on state (e.g. only change temperature after an area has been occupied for a while → extended).

  • Area-Aware Media Player Filters notification playback based on secondary states, such as avoiding alerts in sleeping areas or playing TTS messages only when someone has been around for a while.

By layering presence with secondary states, Magic Areas gives you fine-grained, context-aware control over your automations — making each room react more intelligently to how it's being used.