Organizing by zones

A zone is a place in your organization: a building, a floor, a room. Zones nest, so Floor 2 › Lobby is a room inside a floor. One zone holds hardware from any integration—a Shelly relay, a Home Assistant light, and a Waveshare board can all sit in the same Kitchen.

Zones belong to your organization, not to an integration. Removing an integration never deletes your zones.

Create a floor and a room

1. Open Zones in the dashboard.
2. Add a zone named Floor 2. Leave the parent empty—it’s a top-level zone.
3. Add a zone named Lobby and pick Floor 2 as its parent.

The zones list shows the tree. Open Lobby to see its breadcrumb, the devices and entities in it, and any rooms inside it.

A zone can’t be its own parent or sit under one of its own rooms. If you try, the zone isn’t saved.

Give a building an address

Set a location on a top-level zone, like Building B, and every floor and room under it uses that address. A room can set its own location instead.

Zone locations describe the place only. A device’s address still comes from the device, its integration, or your organization—putting a device in a zone doesn’t change its location.

Place a device and override one entity

Every device can have a zone. Its entities—relays, lights, sensors—follow it unless you place one somewhere else.

Example: a Waveshare relay board with 8 relays sits in a cabinet that serves two rooms.

1. Open the board’s device page and set its zone to Zone A. All 8 relays are now in Zone A.
2. Open relay 3, and under zone choose Specific zone…, then Zone B.
3. Relay 3 is in Zone B. The other 7 relays still show Zone A, marked as inherited from the device.

Later, move the board to Zone C. The 7 inheriting relays move with it. Relay 3 stays in Zone B, because you placed it there yourself.

Place a door

A door has one zone. Open the door on the site’s Doors page and set its zone, or change it from the site’s Zones & Wi-Fi page. Whatever the door opens or switches on—a relay, a gate controller, a light—follows the door’s zone, so you never place those separately.

Because the zone belongs to the door, rewiring doesn’t move it. If Main entrance is in Lobby and you connect it to a different relay, the door is still in Lobby, and the relay you stopped using is no longer anywhere.

• A relay or light that a door uses shows Zone from door and can’t be given a zone of its own. To change where it is, change the door.
• Connecting a relay that already has a zone of its own to a door asks you to clear that zone first, with one click.
• Doors that use the same relay must be in the same zone. Moving one of them, or connecting the relay to a door in another zone, is refused and names the other doors.
• A door with no zone is outside every zone: zone-scoped policies don’t apply to it, and its invitations offer no Wi-Fi. The site’s Zones & Wi-Fi page lists these doors.

Each entity that no door uses has three choices:

Choice	Where the entity is
Same as device	Wherever the device is. This is the default.
Specific zone…	The zone you pick, wherever the device is.
No zone	Nowhere, even if the device has a zone. Zone-scoped policies don’t apply to it.

To move many entities at once, select them in the entities list and use Move to zone….

Import areas from Home Assistant

If your Home Assistant setup already has areas, bring them in instead of retyping them.

1. Open the Home Assistant integration.
2. Run Sync zones.

Each area becomes a zone. A device’s area becomes its zone, and an entity whose area differs from its device’s area gets that area as a specific zone. Relays and lights that a door uses are left to the door.

Sync is safe to run again:

• An area that’s already imported is updated in place, so renaming it in Home Assistant doesn’t create a duplicate.
• If you already have exactly one zone with the same name, the area links to it instead of creating a second one.
• Placements you changed in OpenApp since the last sync stay the way you set them.

Other integrations that expose rooms work the same way. Integrations without rooms don’t offer Sync zones.

Scope a policy to a zone

Policies that can target a single output—most invitation and hold policies—can be limited to a zone. Set the zone on an organization or integration policy, and it applies only to entities in that zone or any room inside it.

For example, an invitation curfew on Floor 2 covers the Lobby and every other room on that floor, from every integration, without listing each door. A hold forbidden policy on Lobby stops doors there from being held open.

An entity set to No zone is never covered by a zone-scoped policy, even when its device is in that zone. A door is covered by the zone it’s in, whichever relay it opens. Each type’s page in the policy catalog says whether it takes an output; those are the types that take a zone. See Policies for how policies combine.

Check what happened in a zone

Open a zone’s Activity tab, or filter Activity by zone. The filter includes rooms inside the zone, so Floor 2 shows events from the Lobby too.

Each event records where the entity or device was when it happened. If you move a relay from Zone A to Zone B, its earlier events stay in Zone A.

Zone activity starts from the release that added zone history. Older events don’t have a zone and don’t show up in a zone filter.

Merge duplicate zones

You may end up with two zones for the same room—for example, a Kitchen you created and a Kitchen from another integration’s import. Zones with the same name are never merged for you, because a matching name doesn’t always mean the same room.

1. Open the zone you want to keep.
2. Use merge and pick the duplicates.

Devices, entities, rooms, and integration links move to the zone you kept, and the duplicates are deleted. Merging needs permission to both update and delete zones.

Delete a zone

A zone that still has rooms, devices, or entities placed in it can’t be deleted on its own. Move them first, or choose to detach them as you delete: rooms become top-level zones, devices and entities end up with no zone. Restoring the zone later doesn’t put them back.

Related

• Zones reference—API, validation, and audit fields
• Entities reference—placement modes on the API
• Quotas and plan limits—zones count toward your plan