Three in the morning. The smoke alarm goes off.
Your first thought isn’t the alarm. It’s the system you spent six months building. The one that monitors temperature sensors in every room, tracks door locks, reads motion patterns, logs everything to your home server. The one you can barely operate half-asleep because it requires opening Home Assistant, navigating to the right dashboard, and finding the right automation to check.
Then you remember. You installed the OpenClaw Home Assistant skill two weeks ago.
You grab your phone. Open Telegram. Type: “What triggered the smoke alarm?”
Your agent responds in three seconds. “Kitchen smoke detector. Temperature normal. No motion detected. Battery status: low. Last test: 6 days ago.”
False alarm. Dead battery. You silence it, make a note to replace it in the morning, and go back to sleep.
That’s the difference between having a smart home and having a smart home you can actually talk to.
The Home Assistant Problem Nobody Mentions
Home Assistant is extraordinary. It connects to everything. Zigbee, Z-Wave, MQTT, Wi-Fi bulbs, Bluetooth sensors, cloud APIs, local integrations — 2,500+ device types and counting. If it plugs in, Home Assistant probably supports it.
The problem isn’t capability. It’s accessibility.
Home Assistant is powerful because it’s configurable. You write automations in YAML. You design dashboards in the UI. You script complex behaviors across dozens of entities. It’s infinitely flexible, which means it’s also infinitely complicated.
When you want to check something simple — did the garage door close, is the thermostat still in away mode, what’s the temperature in the basement — you open the app, wait for the dashboard to load, scroll to the right card, and read the value. It works. It’s just friction.
Voice assistants help, but they’re limited. Alexa and Google Assistant integrate with Home Assistant, but the commands are rigid. “Turn on the living room lights” works. “Show me everything that’s been unlocked in the past hour” doesn’t.
The OpenClaw Home Assistant skill removes that friction. Your agent becomes a conversational interface to your entire Home Assistant setup. Not just simple commands. Full access. Sensor history, automation triggers, entity states, service calls — everything you can do in the Home Assistant UI, you can now do from a chat window.
How It Actually Works in Daily Life
Let’s talk about what this looks like in practice, because the technical description doesn’t capture the shift in how you interact with your home.
You’re on the couch. You realize the front porch light is still on. Instead of finding your phone, unlocking it, opening Home Assistant, navigating to lights, and toggling the switch, you message your agent: “Turn off the porch light.”
It happens. Two seconds.
Later, you’re leaving for a trip. You want to make sure every door and window is secure. You could open each sensor manually in the app, or you type: “Are all doors and windows closed?”
Your agent checks every contact sensor in Home Assistant and responds: “All secure except the back bedroom window.”
You go close it. Then: “Set the house to away mode.”
Done.
A week later, you’re at dinner and you get a Home Assistant notification. Motion detected in the living room. You’re 200 miles away. Instead of panicking, you ask your agent: “What motion sensors have triggered in the past 10 minutes?”
“Living room motion sensor at 7:14 PM. No other activity.”
“Show me the living room camera.”
It pulls the camera feed. It’s your cat.
That’s the daily experience. Not revolutionary in the sense of new capabilities — Home Assistant could already do all of this. Revolutionary in the sense that you can finally access those capabilities without opening an app, navigating menus, or remembering entity names.
Your smart home becomes conversational. You ask questions in plain English. You get answers immediately. You issue commands the way you’d talk to a person.
What Connects When You Install the OpenClaw Home Assistant Skill
The OpenClaw Home Assistant skill doesn’t replace Home Assistant. It sits on top of it as a natural language interface. Everything you’ve already configured — every device, automation, sensor, and script — becomes accessible through chat.
Here’s what that means in terms of actual capabilities.
Full entity control. Lights, switches, locks, thermostats, fans, covers — anything Home Assistant classifies as an entity, your agent can control. Turn on, turn off, set to a specific value, query current state. If Home Assistant exposes it, OpenClaw can talk to it.
Sensor queries across time. Home Assistant logs sensor data. Temperature, humidity, motion, door status, energy usage — it’s all stored in the database. The skill lets you query that history conversationally. “What was the average living room temperature yesterday?” works. So does “Show me every time the garage door opened this week.”
Automation triggers and status. You can ask which automations ran recently, what triggered them, and whether they succeeded. You can manually trigger automations by name. “Run the bedtime routine” calls the Home Assistant automation you already built.
Service calls from chat. Home Assistant exposes services — functions like “turn on light,” “set thermostat temperature,” or “lock door.” The skill translates your natural language requests into the correct service calls with the right parameters. You don’t need to remember that the thermostat service is climate.set_temperature or that brightness takes a value from 0 to 255. You just say what you want.
Scene and script execution. If you’ve built scenes or scripts in Home Assistant, the skill can activate them. “Set movie mode” or “Run the morning routine” — it maps your language to the Home Assistant entity and executes it.
Multi-entity queries. This is where it gets interesting. You can ask questions that span dozens of entities. “Which lights are currently on?” checks every light entity in your system. “What’s the status of all locks?” queries every lock. “Show me battery levels below 20%” scans every battery-powered device and returns the ones that need attention.
The skill uses Home Assistant’s REST API and WebSocket connection. It authenticates via a Long-Lived Access Token, which you generate once in the Home Assistant UI and store as an environment variable. From that point forward, your agent has full read-write access to your Home Assistant instance.
If you’re running Home Assistant on your local network, the agent needs to be on the same network or have access via VPN. If you’ve exposed Home Assistant through Nabu Casa Cloud or a reverse proxy, remote access works immediately.
The Scenarios That Make You Wonder How You Lived Without It
Certain use cases only become obvious after you’ve been using the skill for a while. These are the moments where conversational access fundamentally changes behavior.
Debugging Automations
You built an automation that’s supposed to turn off all the lights at midnight. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. Figuring out why means opening Home Assistant, going to the automation editor, checking the trace logs, cross-referencing entity states.
With the skill: “Show me the trace for the midnight lights automation.”
Your agent pulls the most recent execution log and tells you exactly which step failed and why. Usually it’s a sensor that didn’t update, or a condition that evaluated false. Two minutes to diagnose instead of twenty.
Checking on Things While You’re Away
You’re on vacation. A neighbor texts: “I think your garage door is open.”
You could VPN into your network, open Home Assistant, navigate to the garage, and check the status. Or you message your agent: “Is the garage door open?”
“Garage door has been open for 42 minutes.”
“Close the garage door.”
“Garage door closed.”
Thirty seconds. No apps. No VPN configuration.
Morning Briefings
Every morning, you want to know the same things. Outside temperature, indoor humidity levels, which windows are open, whether the washing machine finished overnight.
You could check each sensor manually. Or you teach your agent what a morning briefing means and just ask: “Morning briefing.”
It responds with the full status because it remembers context. Same question every day, same structured response.
Energy Monitoring
Home Assistant tracks energy usage if you have the right sensors. The data lives in dashboards and the energy panel. Accessing it means opening the app and navigating.
With the skill, you can ask: “How much energy did the house use yesterday?” or “Which devices are using the most power right now?” The agent queries the sensors, aggregates the data, and gives you a summary.
Over time, this changes how you think about energy. It’s not buried in a dashboard you check once a month. It’s available whenever you’re curious, which means you’re curious more often.
Nighttime Checks
Before bed, you want to make sure the house is locked down. Doors locked, windows closed, garage shut, outdoor lights off, thermostat set to night mode.
You could walk through the house checking everything, or open Home Assistant and verify each entity. Or you ask: “Is the house ready for bed?”
Your agent checks the standard set of entities and tells you what’s out of place. If everything’s secure, it confirms. If the back door is unlocked, it tells you.
Then: “Lock it and run the bedtime scene.”
Done.
Setting Up the OpenClaw Home Assistant Skill
The setup has two parts: configuring Home Assistant and installing the skill on your OpenClaw agent.
Generate a Long-Lived Access Token in Home Assistant
Home Assistant uses Long-Lived Access Tokens for API authentication. You create one through the Home Assistant web interface.
Log into Home Assistant. Click your profile in the bottom left. Scroll down to “Long-Lived Access Tokens.” Click “Create Token.” Name it something like “OpenClaw Agent” so you remember what it’s for. Copy the token. You won’t see it again.
Set it as an environment variable on the machine running your OpenClaw agent:
export HOME_ASSISTANT_TOKEN=your_long_lived_token_hereAdd that line to your shell profile so it persists across sessions.
Set the Home Assistant URL
Your agent needs to know where to find your Home Assistant instance. If it’s running locally, that’s usually something like http://192.168.1.100:8123. If you’re using Nabu Casa Cloud or a custom domain, use that URL instead.
Set it as an environment variable:
export HOME_ASSISTANT_URL=http://192.168.1.100:8123Again, add it to your shell profile.
Install the Skill
With the token and URL configured, install the skill via ClawHub:
clawhub install home-assistantRestart your agent if needed:
openclaw restartTest the Connection
Send your agent a message: “List all lights in Home Assistant.”
If it returns a list of your lights, the connection works. If it errors, double-check the token and URL. Most issues come from typos in the environment variables or network access problems.
Once the connection is live, you have full conversational access to your Home Assistant setup.
What You Can Actually Say
The skill interprets natural language, which means the phrasing is flexible. Here are real examples that work.
Entity control:
- “Turn on the kitchen lights.”
- “Set the thermostat to 68 degrees.”
- “Lock the front door.”
- “Open the garage door.”
- “Turn off all the lights in the bedroom.”
Status queries:
- “What’s the temperature in the living room?”
- “Is the back door locked?”
- “Which lights are currently on?”
- “Show me battery levels for all sensors.”
- “What’s the humidity in the basement?”
Automation and scene control:
- “Run the good morning automation.”
- “Activate movie mode.”
- “Turn off all automations.”
- “Show me recent automation triggers.”
Historical data:
- “What was the average temperature in the office yesterday?”
- “How many times did the front door open today?”
- “Show me motion sensor activity for the past hour.”
- “When did the washing machine finish?”
Multi-entity operations:
- “Turn off all lights on the first floor.”
- “Lock all doors.”
- “Set all thermostats to away mode.”
- “Show me every window that’s open.”
The skill uses Claude’s language model to interpret your intent. You don’t need exact phrasing. “Dim the bedroom lights a bit” works as well as “Set bedroom lights to 40% brightness.” The model figures it out.
Where the Skill Struggles and What It Can’t Do
The OpenClaw Home Assistant skill is powerful, but it’s not magic. There are limitations worth knowing before you rely on it completely.
Complex conditional logic is awkward. You can ask for straightforward checks, but multi-step conditional queries get messy. “If the living room temperature is above 75 and it’s after 6 PM and nobody’s home, turn on the AC” is better handled by a native Home Assistant automation. The skill can trigger that automation, but building the logic through chat doesn’t work well.
No dashboard access. The skill interacts with entities, sensors, and services. It doesn’t render Home Assistant dashboards or Lovelace cards. If you need to see a visual layout, you still open the app.
Latency on large queries. If you ask for a complex query across hundreds of entities, response time increases. “Show me the state of every sensor in the house” might take 5-10 seconds if you have 200 sensors. Simple queries are near-instant.
Limited media control. The skill can call media player services, but advanced media control — queuing specific albums, managing playlists, adjusting equalizer settings — is better handled by dedicated skills like sonoscli for Sonos or Samsung SmartThings integrations for TVs.
Requires Home Assistant to be running. This is obvious, but worth stating. If your Home Assistant instance goes offline, the skill stops working. It’s not a replacement for Home Assistant — it’s an interface layer.
No camera live view in chat. You can ask about camera states and check motion, but streaming live camera feeds into your messaging app isn’t supported. You’ll still open Home Assistant or the camera’s native app for video.
None of these are dealbreakers. The skill handles the 80% use case — checking status, controlling devices, triggering automations, querying sensors — better than any other interface. For the remaining 20%, you fall back to the Home Assistant app.
Pairing the Skill with Other OpenClaw Skills
The Home Assistant skill gets more useful when combined with other skills in the OpenClaw ecosystem.
Terminal access with vibetunnel. The vibetunnel skill gives your agent access to terminal sessions. Pair it with Home Assistant and you can check server logs, restart Home Assistant, or troubleshoot add-ons without SSH-ing in manually. “Show me the last 50 lines of the Home Assistant log” works from your couch.
Browser automation with browser-cash. Some devices don’t integrate directly with Home Assistant but have web dashboards. The browser-cash skill lets your agent navigate those dashboards, click buttons, and read values. Your agent can pull data from a web-only thermostat and feed it into a Home Assistant sensor, all from a chat command.
Notifications and task tracking. Pair Home Assistant sensor alerts with task management skills. “If the smoke detector battery drops below 20%, create a ClickUp task to replace it.” Your agent bridges the systems.
Voice output via ElevenLabs. The elevenlabs-skill adds text-to-speech. Ask your agent for a home status update and have it read the response aloud. Useful for hands-free scenarios or accessibility.
Data logging to spreadsheets. Use Google Sheets or Airtable skills to log Home Assistant data over time. “Log the current energy usage to the daily tracker sheet” creates a manual data point you can analyze later.
The skill ecosystem is designed to be composable. Home Assistant handles devices. OpenClaw connects the conversational layer. Other skills extend what’s possible.
Why This Matters More Than It Sounds Like It Does
Reading about the OpenClaw Home Assistant skill, it might sound like a convenience feature. A nicer interface. Slightly faster access to things you could already do.
Use it for a month and the shift is deeper than that.
The way you think about your smart home changes. Home Assistant stops being a platform you configure and occasionally check. It becomes a system you converse with constantly. You ask questions you wouldn’t have bothered asking before because the friction of opening an app and navigating to the right dashboard was too high.
That changes behavior. You check sensors more often because it’s effortless. You notice patterns — the basement humidity creeps up on rainy days, the garage door gets left open every Thursday after trash pickup, the bedroom temperature drops faster than the rest of the house. You wouldn’t have noticed those patterns without the data, and you wouldn’t have accessed the data without conversational access.
It also changes how non-technical people in your household interact with the system. Home Assistant’s UI is intimidating if you didn’t build it. Telegram isn’t. A family member who would never open Home Assistant will message the agent: “Turn off the porch light.” And it works. Suddenly your smart home is accessible to everyone in the house, not just the person who configured it.
The skill doesn’t add capabilities to Home Assistant. It changes how accessible those capabilities are. And accessibility, over time, is the difference between a system you use occasionally and a system you rely on daily.
Common Questions
Does this work if Home Assistant is only accessible locally?
Yes, as long as your OpenClaw agent is running on the same network or has VPN access. Set the HOME_ASSISTANT_URL to your local IP and it works. For remote access without VPN, expose Home Assistant through Nabu Casa Cloud or a reverse proxy with SSL.
Can the skill trigger Home Assistant automations I’ve already built?
Absolutely. Just reference the automation by name. “Run the bedtime automation” triggers it the same way clicking it in the UI would.
What happens if the Long-Lived Access Token expires or gets revoked?
The skill stops working until you generate a new token and update the environment variable. Home Assistant doesn’t auto-expire Long-Lived Access Tokens unless you manually revoke them, so this rarely happens in practice.
Does the skill work with Home Assistant add-ons like ESPHome or Zigbee2MQTT?
The skill talks to Home Assistant’s API, which exposes all entities regardless of how they were added. If the device shows up in Home Assistant, the skill can control it. The underlying integration doesn’t matter.
Can I limit what the skill can access?
Home Assistant tokens have full access by default. You can’t scope them to specific entities or read-only access. If you want restrictions, run a separate limited Home Assistant user and generate the token under that account.
How does this compare to the Alexa or Google Assistant integrations?
Those integrations support simple commands through voice. The OpenClaw skill supports complex queries, historical data, multi-entity operations, and full service calls through text. Voice assistants are faster for hands-free control. OpenClaw is more powerful for everything else.
What if my Home Assistant setup uses custom components?
As long as the custom component exposes entities or services through the standard Home Assistant API, the skill can interact with them. Heavily customized YAML configurations and template sensors work fine.
Can the skill create new automations or modify existing ones?
No. The skill reads and triggers automations, but it doesn’t edit Home Assistant configuration files or create new automations. You still build those in the Home Assistant UI or YAML editor.
The Bigger Picture: OpenClaw as a Smart Home Interface
The Home Assistant skill is part of a broader shift in how OpenClaw handles smart home control.
Home Assistant brings 2,500+ integrations into the OpenClaw ecosystem. Devices that don’t have dedicated OpenClaw skills — Ecobee thermostats, Ring doorbells, Philips Hue bridges — can be controlled through Home Assistant’s unified API. The OpenClaw skill becomes a bridge to that entire ecosystem.
Pair that with the samsung-smartthings skill for direct Samsung device control, sonoscli for Sonos speakers, and browser-cash for web-only devices, and you end up with near-complete coverage of the smart home landscape. One agent, one chat interface, access to everything.
Browse the full Smart Home category on Oh My OpenClaw to see what else connects. Or if you’re just getting started with OpenClaw skills in general, read How to Find and Install Free OpenClaw Skills for the complete walkthrough.
The goal isn’t to replace Home Assistant. It’s to make Home Assistant accessible in the way you already communicate. Through chat. In plain English. From whatever messaging app you prefer.
Three in the morning, when the smoke alarm goes off, you don’t want to navigate a dashboard. You want to ask a question and get an answer.
That’s what the OpenClaw Home Assistant skill does.