You’ve got your Home Assistant set up and now you’re looking to automate things. One aspect of automation includes different actions happening based on your location. Maybe you want to receive a notification every time your child makes it to school; or maybe you want to send a text to somebody whenever you leave your work? The way to trigger those actions would involve presence detection but more importantly, zones.

Creating a new zone with Home Assistant is extremely easy. Go to your settings tab and then select the “Areas & Zones” button.

Once you are on the Areas & Zones page you will want to select the “Zones” tab at the top and then select the “+ Add Zone” button in the bottom right corner. This will bring up the New Zone dialog where you will create the zone.

Simply zoom out and move the cursor to the location you would like to add for the new zone. After that add a name to that zone and select the radius for that specific zone. If you’re trying to create a zone around a neighborhood you would want it to be larger than a zone for say, a supermarket. You will have to physically move the cursor to the new zone. This means you might have to zoom out to easily click and drag the marker to your new zone location.

There is an option to make this location “passive” if you would like. A passive location does not show up on the frontend, but you can use it for automations. If you want to avoid overloading your map with all of your zone, select passive. If you don’t mind having the locations show on your map, keep the toggle off.

You placed the marker, named the zone, and created the radius. Now you can use that zone for any automation you would like!