I wish I had some water meters that I could monitor to take advantage of the Energy dashboard, but sadly I don't have a submeter I can access.
Home Assistant just keeps methodically getting better!
this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2026
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In a world where everything is entshitifying this project is really refreshing
I have a smart water meter installed by the utility provider with a cloud integration, unfortunately the readings have a 24-48h delay so it’s no use for real time monitoring.
This update seems pretty tame from the release notes, but I was worried about the python update.
I have a lot of HACS integrations, and several HACS custom repository integrations that are updated very slowly when things get updated around them.
I'm happy to report that all of my integrations work just fine after the update.
HA is fantastic once you’re past the learning curve but is still aggressively unintuitive sometimes, and I find little irritants all the time. Why can’t you make the Settings pages and sub-pages top level menu items? Why are entities and devices buried so deep in Settings? Why can’t you edit Zones from the Map view? Why can’t you easily rename entities in bulk on a per-device basis? Why can’t you automatically replace entity references in Automations with an updated entity name? Why isn’t there good documentation overall about how the system works instead of just technical documentation with narrow focuses? Why is the discord full of Linux elitist types who expect you to know the system when you’re trying to learn it?
It’s the little things everywhere that make me long for a Valve Software level of polish. There has been progress like the push to not manually configure things with YAML, but it’s so slow.
The fact that dimming a room turns ON all the lights in the room is actually wild
Dimming is just light.room: turn on > XX% so it makes sense that it would turn on all lights assigned to that specific entity. I use Adaptive Brightness so that I don't have to fiddle with dimming lights manually. The sun does that for me.
I know how it works, I'm just saying it's unintuitive. It's not how any other smart home system works.
I use adaptive brightness too, actually. But nearly every time I'm manually adjusting a room's existing brightness, I don't want every single unpowered devices to turn on, too.
You could create a separate light group for the ones you typically do have on at those times and just use that when you want to dim the room lights
What would you expect it to do? I would think you're telling it to set all lights to whatever level...
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This one broke zigbee2mqtt for me but I'm not sure why. I rolled back for now.
Again?? Sigh...
right lol
Thanks for the heads up! Half my network is through z2mqtt
Wake word on mobile is very exciting, but it doesn't seem to work on my device. It won't even let me turn it on, and says that HA is not my default assistant even though it definitely is.
I've got it working on my S24. I've been waiting so long for this.
I was excited too! But they mention it kills the battery as Google doesn't let the access the system API for it, so we'll see whether it stays enabled.
I used their advice from the blog to make an automation that turns it on when I'm home, and off when I'm away.
I spend 90% of my time at home so that probably won't help my battery much 😅
You probably have a charger at home, though.
Haha you got me, I do have a charger at home. I'm just not used to charging in the day, I normally charge overnight. But I guess I could charge more if needed.
To be fair, doubling the amount of charge cycles is not great for your battery. So even with a charger available one should consider whether it's worth it.
Thanks for commenting that. I only quickly read the blog. I've just set those automations up.
Following up. I found the mic/wakeword being active overnight prevented my Android Auto-Restart from occurring. Setup another automation to turn off wakeword overnight and turn it back on around my usual alarm time.
I turned it off because it kept triggering when I (or someone else) was talking to my Home Assistant Voice Preview (which the blog says it won't do...). I also never really worked out good uses for it. My HAVP is in my kitchen/living room area, and is mostly used for playing music and kitchen related things (setting timers, unit conversions, etc).
If I ask home assistant on my phone to play music, it plays it on the HAVP speaker in my kitchen. I don't really have a need for timers or conversions outside of the kitchen where I already have the HAVP so didn't find any use for it on my phone.
Ended up having to change my default assistant, then change it back to Homeassistant for it to recognize that it was the default. There's already a bug report for it as well.
Any smart bulbs we can still flash? Once they're set up and joined, I want to use the BT for presence detection.
Flash with ESPHome? Not that I'm aware of (but would be nice to know)
Edit: just found this: Smart Bulb (9W/RGB+CT) - Preflashed & Preconfigured
I'm happy with the Shelly bulbs, they work without internet shenanigans and can do MQTT, etc...
I have used Pi Zeros and ESPresense for prsence detection... seem to work ok, but if you're wanting to do room-level detection, (ie who's where), then that seems to be really difficult to tune the sensitivity
Really impressed with the way they keep building this out.
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