Example · Home automation · Sensors & devices · Agents

A home that remembers

Home Assistant forgets after ten days. Here every change is kept, explained for agents and asked about in plain words.

Home Assistant

Verified 23 October 2026

Everything Home Assistant sees, kept in one table; agents read it with the house's own notes.

Give your home a longer memory.

Home Assistant's recorder keeps every change for about ten days, then only hourly averages. For the questions a house actually raises you want all of it, for years: what the solar panels made, what the car took, how warm the house was last winter.

This is a family house in Spain with solar panels on the roof, a car charger driven by a smart-charging automation, air conditioning in four rooms, motorised blinds and 33 lights. Since 4 October every change Home Assistant sees lands in one table of a private catalog, home, and an agent answers questions over it.

Home Assistantone automation, every minute
Device sinka private address that writes rows
home catalogha.states and its AGENTS.md
Claude and your agentdashboards and questions

state changes since 4 October: 330,500
entities, from the inverter to the blinds: 194
is all they take as a table: 3.7 MB
from a change in the house to a query: 6 min

Counted in the home catalog on 23 October 2026.

Before you start

Home AssistantAny install whose configuration folder your agent can reach.
An agentClaude Code or Codex on the computer that holds Home Assistant's configuration.
No account to startThe agent makes a catalog. You keep it with one link and a code.
Claude (optional)For the dashboard: the LakehouseBox connector in Claude's settings.

Start with one prompt

Open Claude Code (or Codex) on the computer that holds Home Assistant's configuration, and paste this.

Claude Code (or any other agent)Example conversation

You

Check out the LakehouseBox skill for Home Assistant (lakehousebox.com/docs/guides/home-assistant/), and get me started moving my Home Assistant history data to LakehouseBox.

Agent · example reply

The history is in LakehouseBox. Here is what I did, and the one thing I need from you.

Done: with no saved key and nobody at the keyboard, I made a catalog with lhbox new (no account yet). I took a consistent snapshot of the recorder's database, never the live file, and moved every state change it held plus its hourly statistics: 310 rows from 40 entities. I left out device_tracker (locations); say if you want it.

What I need from you: open the link I give you, sign up or log in, type the code, choose where the catalog goes and pick read and write, so I can switch on the live feed. Unclaimed, it is deleted in 72 hours.

Example replies show what to expect. Your agent adapts to your setup.

Gets a catalog of its own with no account; it is kept 72 hours unless you keep it
Copies a snapshot of Home Assistant's database, never touching the live one
Moves every state change of the last 10 days and every hourly statistic Home Assistant ever kept
Leaves out location history unless you say yes
Answers a first question from your data, so you can see it arrived

With the LakehouseBox plugin installed (/plugin marketplace add lakehousebox/agent-skills, then /plugin install lakehousebox@lakehousebox in Claude Code), your agent finds the skill by itself. The link in the prompt works without it.

Verified · 12 October 2026

History movedFirst question answeredOn the guide's test house: 310 state changes from 40 entities and every hourly statistic, in 88 seconds.

Keep it

One link and one code: the only step that is yours.

Your turn · in the browser

Keep your history

Open the link your agent gives you. Sign up or log in, type the code from your agent's message (never from a link someone sent you), and choose where the catalog goes. Pick read and write: with read only, your agent cannot switch on the live feed and has to ask again.

Let it keep flowing

The agent connects Home Assistant, so every change arrives once a minute.

Creates a private address for Home Assistant and keeps it in your secrets.yaml
Backs up your configuration, then adds one automation and a sensor that tells you if uploads stop
Runs Home Assistant's own configuration check, then restarts it once
Checks the first rows arrive, and fills in the minutes between the move and the restart

Every minute in which something changed, Home Assistant sends the new state of each entity: thermostats with the room temperature, the setpoint and whether they are cooling, blinds with their position, lights with their brightness, sensors with their value and unit, and every attribute. A minute with no change sends nothing.

Verified · 23 October 2026

Rows arriving every minute0 rows rejectedAbout 17,000 state changes a day from 194 entities, committed every 6 minutes since 4 October.

Tell agents what your house means

sensor.power_meter_exported means nothing to an agent until someone says it is a counter.

A catalog can carry an AGENTS.md: notes from its owner that every agent opening the catalog is pointed to. This house's notes say which counters only ever grow, which sign means buying and which selling, what each hour of the tariff costs, and the rule the car charger follows.

Claude Code (or any other agent)Example conversation

You

Write an AGENTS.md for the home catalog: what the energy counters mean, our tariff and its three periods, and the car charging rules, so any agent reading this catalog gets the sums right.

Agent · example reply

Done: lhbox catalog agents-md home --set AGENTS.md. It explains the three cumulative counters (bought, sold, produced) and how to turn them into energy per day, the sign of the grid power, the three tariff periods with their prices, and the charging rule: from the grid only in the cheap night hours, otherwise only from solar surplus. It ends with a query for energy per day and period that I checked against the table.

Example replies show what to expect. Your agent adapts to your setup.

entity_id	meaning
`sensor.power_meter_consumption`	grid import, cumulative kWh (what the house buys)
`sensor.power_meter_exported`	grid export, cumulative kWh (sold at 0.04 €/kWh)
`sensor.inverter_total_yield`	solar production, cumulative kWh
`sensor.power_meter_active_power`	grid power now, W: positive = export

From the catalog's AGENTS.md: the counters an agent needs for any energy question.

See it on a dashboard

In Claude, connect LakehouseBox and ask: Claude writes the queries and draws them, live.

Your turn · in Claude

Connect LakehouseBox in Claude

In Claude's settings, under Connectors, add LakehouseBox (https://mcp.lakehousebox.com/mcp) and approve it. On the approval page, tick read on your catalog: the connector sees only the catalogs you tick.

Claude Code (or any other agent)Example conversation

You

From the home catalog, show me per day what the solar panels made, what we bought from the grid and what we sold.

Agent · example reply

Here are the 18 full days since the feed started. The panels made 4.6 to 17.5 kWh a day. The house bought the most on 12, 17, 18 and 20 October, the days the car charged longest from the grid at the cheap rate; 12 October, a national holiday, was cheap all day.

Example replies show what to expect. Your agent adapts to your setup.

Solar produced, bought and sold per day in this house, 5 to 22 October 2026, from the query below.

Energy per day, from the three counters

WITH daily AS (
  SELECT entity_id, CAST(timezone('Europe/Madrid', event_time) AS DATE) AS day, max(value) AS v
  FROM home.ha.states
  WHERE entity_id IN ('sensor.power_meter_consumption', 'sensor.power_meter_exported', 'sensor.inverter_total_yield')
    AND value IS NOT NULL
  GROUP BY ALL),
d AS (SELECT entity_id, day, v - lag(v) OVER (PARTITION BY entity_id ORDER BY day) AS kwh FROM daily)
SELECT day,
  round(sum(kwh) FILTER (WHERE entity_id = 'sensor.inverter_total_yield'), 1) AS solar_kwh,
  round(sum(kwh) FILTER (WHERE entity_id = 'sensor.power_meter_consumption'), 1) AS bought_kwh,
  round(sum(kwh) FILTER (WHERE entity_id = 'sensor.power_meter_exported'), 1) AS sold_kwh
FROM d WHERE kwh IS NOT NULL
GROUP BY day ORDER BY day;

A dashboard runs its queries with each viewer's own access: someone you share it with needs read on the catalog.

Ask it a question

The charger's automation writes its decision every minute to sensor.ev_charging_decision, so the rule it is meant to follow can be checked against what it did. Did the car ever charge from the grid outside the cheap hours?

When the car charged, by tariff period

SELECT split_part(state, ' ', 2) AS period,
  regexp_extract(state, 'mode=(\w+)', 1) AS mode,
  count(*) AS minutes_charging,
  round(avg(TRY_CAST(regexp_extract(state, 'grid=(-?\d+)W', 1) AS INT))) AS avg_grid_w
FROM home.ha.states
WHERE entity_id = 'sensor.ev_charging_decision'
  AND regexp_extract(state, '-> (\S+)$', 1) NOT IN ('idle', 'pause')
GROUP BY ALL ORDER BY 1, 2;

period	mode	minutes_charging	avg_grid_w
llano	solar	409	819
punta	solar	190	656
valle	grid	6,025	−1,522
valle	solar	43	−436

No. In the dearer periods (llano, punta) the car charged only in solar mode, and the house was still selling 650 to 820 W on average while it did. Charging from the grid happened only in valle, the cheap night and weekend rate.

How warm did the house get last week, and when was the air conditioning on?
What did electricity cost us yesterday, by tariff period?
How much of the solar we made did we use ourselves this month?
Email me every morning what yesterday's electricity cost.

What to know

History older than what Home Assistant still holds when you start is gone: its states of the last ten days and its hourly statistics since it was installed are moved, nothing before. A device that changes several times within one minute keeps only its last value. If the internet or LakehouseBox is down, those minutes are not sent again, and the sensor your agent added turns on so you know. Location history is left out unless you say yes. The home catalog is private: a home's data says who is in and when.

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