Home Assistant is good at noticing things — a leak, a door left open, a freezer running warm. The gap is what happens next. A push notification is easy to miss if your phone is charging in another room, or set to Do Not Disturb overnight, which is exactly when a leak or an open door matters most.
What to watch
Not every sensor deserves a phone call. A useful split:
- WhatsApp for things worth knowing soon: a door left open, a freezer temperature drifting, a routine automation check-in.
- A phone call for things that can’t wait: a leak sensor while you’re away, a smoke or CO alarm, anything that could get worse by morning.
How to set it up
BreakPass doesn’t replace Home Assistant or decide what’s critical — your automations already do that. You just point the automation’s notification at BreakPass instead of, or alongside, a push notification:
- Add an automation action that calls your BreakPass webhook link, the same way you’d call any other notification service in Home Assistant.
- For email-only sensors or third-party integrations, send to your BreakPass email address instead.
- Keep your existing sensors and automations — nothing new to install in the house itself.
Tips
- Save BreakPass’s number as a favourite (iPhone) or a starred contact (Android) before you need it. Only a phone call can ring through Do Not Disturb, and only once the number is saved that way. A contact card is provided during setup to make this a one-tap step.
- WhatsApp and SMS follow your phone’s normal notification settings, so they won’t wake you the way a call can — pick the channel to match how urgent the trigger really is.
- Add a household member as a second recipient for anything that affects the whole home, not just you.
- Start narrow. A handful of high-value automations (leak, door, smoke) beats alerting on everything Home Assistant can see.
This isn’t a replacement for the sensors themselves, or for Home Assistant’s own logic — it’s the last mile, making sure that when your home notices something, a person does too, even at 2am.