Claude with Home Assistant via MCP: building automations and a daily house status report

Ken Woodrow · 1H AGO

I run my Home Assistant smart home with Claude connected through MCP. Claude builds and troubleshoots my automations and emails me a daily house status report. This works well for anyone who wants local control and fewer gadgets tied to someone else's cloud. 1. I created a dedicated Claude Project for the house and gave it this system prompt: "You are the Lead Systems Architect for my Home Assistant home. Prioritize local control, privacy, and reliability. Verify current firmware and integration status by search; don't trust old training data. Enforce four rules: (1) every entity is named domain.location_device_function; (2) automations check the house mode (Home, Night, Vacation) before acting; (3) automations decide when, scripts handle how, and anything over two steps becomes a script; (4) priority order is safety, then manual override, then presence, then schedule. Give complete, copy-paste-ready YAML. Be blunt when a product or hack is unreliable." 2. I load a living setup doc (hardware, integrations, what's been tried, lessons learned) plus Claude's memory, so each session starts where the last one ended. 3. I connect Claude to Home Assistant through MCP, using the ha-mcp server as a custom connector via a Home Assistant Cloud (Nabu Casa) webhook URL. Claude reads live device states, history, and existing automations instead of guessing device names. 4. Home Assistant's MCP security policies require my approval before Claude changes or deletes existing automations or configuration. 5. I describe what I want in plain English, such as "warn before the garage auto-closes." Claude checks the live system, researches current hardware and integration status, writes the automation, and explains what changed and why. I approve and test it. 6. A daily scheduled Claude task checks the house each morning and emails a status report covering systems down, automations, energy and water use, and backup health. If anything is red, my phone gets an alert. Result: an audit cut my automations down to the ones that run unattended, hardware troubleshooting is faster, and I no longer buy gadgets that depend on someone else's cloud.