altmenorg/HAsmartirrigation v2026.11.0 on GitHub

The biggest release of Smart Irrigation so far: it can now run your whole irrigation itself, programs, schedules and pumps included, and the panel was reworked from end to end. Three alphas, four betas and three release candidates went into it, with your reports at every step.

Before you update

Smart Irrigation now needs Home Assistant 2026.3 or later.
The water balance is replayed in five-minute steps (see What changes for everyone): the amounts follow the weather more closely than before, so the durations of the first days may differ a little from what you are used to.
Some actions have new names, and the old ones keep working until v2027.11 (see Fewer actions): nothing in your automations breaks today.

Why a controller

For years, Smart Irrigation and Irrigation Unlimited worked as a pair for a lot of you: Smart Irrigation worked out how much each zone needed, Irrigation Unlimited ran the valves. It was a good pair, and it served many gardens well.

Irrigation Unlimited's activity has become low, though, and at our level it matters to limit that dependency: the watering of a garden should not hang on a piece that may stop following Home Assistant. So Smart Irrigation now knows how to run the valves itself: programs, schedules, pumps, all of it, in one integration, with the calculated durations as the default rather than something an automation has to hand over.

Nothing changes for those who keep Irrigation Unlimited: the blueprints that feed it are still here and still maintained, and the full controller stays off unless you switch it on. If you want to move over, an import brings your Irrigation Unlimited configuration across in a few clicks.

A big thank you to @rgc99 for Irrigation Unlimited and for all these years of work on it. Many of the ideas in the full controller come from what it showed was needed.

Nothing changes unless you switch it on

The full controller is off by default. Update, restart, and Smart Irrigation keeps doing what it did: calculate how long each zone waters, and open the valves itself only if you already use direct valve control. Your settings and automations are untouched.

The full controller

Switch it on in Settings, in its own card (it asks before turning on). You get a Watering tab:

Programs: ordered steps, one zone or several at once, watered for the duration Smart Irrigation calculated (or a percentage of it, or a fixed time), with a minimum and a maximum, time added or removed, passes (cycle and soak), rounds, waits between steps (negative to overlap), a volume limit, and a minimum deficit for the step.
Schedules anchored to a start or to an end ("done by sunrise"): days of the week, every N days, odd or even days, days of the month, months, a period of the year, polar days and nights, a hard deadline. Each schedule shows what can hold it back (rain sensor, frost, wind, rain forecast, days between, soil moisture), and you untick what it should ignore, the rain for a greenhouse for example.
Planning: what will run and when, with the forecast rain credited, the same figure as the Start page and the zone cards.
Pumps and valves: pumps and main valves that run around a zone, with delays before and after, a power cut before starting for a pump that needs one, and the other valves of a zone.
The running watering, where you look: Start, the zones and the card show which zone is watering and for how long, and what a pause holds.
Run a program now (queued, or replacing what runs), pause, resume, skip to the next step, stop, adjust a program's durations for a while, suspend a zone or a program. The pause and the queue survive a restart. A check every minute that an open valve is still open, per-zone confirmation settings for slow cloud valves, a hardware dead-man on valves that support it (verified on a Sonoff SWV), an alert for a zone that no program waters, and a sensor per program.
Import from Irrigation Unlimited, with a report of what came across.

Your current setup becomes the main program: your start trigger, sequencing and cycle and soak, as they are.

It drives real valves and pumps: start with a program on a zone you can watch. Switching it on closes, at startup, any valve that no run of ours owns.

What changes for everyone

The water balance is replayed in five-minute steps. Rain used to be added for the whole interval and drained over all of it, so a late shower could be drained before it fell. The daily evapotranspiration is never negative, and a sensor or a weather service that goes silent no longer lends its last values to later calculations.
A Home Assistant weather entity can be your weather service: DWD, Met.no, KNMI, the NWS or any weather integration you have.
One switch to stop it all: Calculate and water, the first card of Settings, and switch.smart_irrigation_irrigation_enabled on the hub device, for the winter (#960, thanks @jubudu).
A valve per zone (valve.smart_irrigation_<zone>) with direct valve control, for dashboards and voice assistants: open waters the zone for its calculated duration.
Postpone from a dashboard (24 h and 48 h buttons, Resume), and a Water button on each zone card.
One word for each thing, in the panel, Home Assistant and the docs, in all 20 languages: water balance (was "bucket"), module (was "calculation engine"), crop factor. A glossary lists them. Only the displayed names change: entity ids, attributes and actions keep theirs.
Entity categories: the multipliers and the rain skip settings are listed under Configuration; three sensors that repeat an attribute of the duration sensor are diagnostic and disabled on zones created from now on. Existing zones keep their entities as they are.

The panel, reworked

Settings by topic, and the Data tab becomes Weather.
The Zones page: your zones first, an open zone in three parts (the zone and its valve, what it needs, where it stands), the water balance changed only after Change, the actions that discard data apart and outlined in red. A value nobody chose says so, and each soil shows the drainage rate it sets.
Start opens with the answer, says every "when" of the next run (trigger, calculation), each one a link to where it is set, and what is wrong first when something needs doing.
The setup assistant asks only what the module needs, suggests the sensors it can tell apart, and calculates the new zone at once.
On a phone, every tab in view, centred.
Numbers in your number format, durations written one way everywhere, and much faster while the panel is open.

Fewer actions, nothing breaks

Where Smart Irrigation had a "one zone" and an "all zones" version of an action, there is now one: calculate, update_weather, set_bucket (without a value it resets to 0), set_multiplier, set_seasonal_adjustment. Pick zones as the target, or none for all of them.

The old names keep working until v2027.11, removed in winter, outside the watering season. Until then each one logs a warning and raises a repair notice that names the action to use. The recurring schedules are deprecated without a replacement: the programs' schedules do what they did. The blueprints Smart Irrigation installs use the new names.

Fixes

Among many, found by you in the pre-releases:

A day without Home Assistant at midnight no longer counts as already decided: a schedule could water the next day with rain forecast above its threshold (#1027).
A zone linked to its own valve entity no longer opens itself in a loop, and a manual zone keeps the duration you typed (#1021, #1032).
After an update from v2026.10, a postponement no longer reads as skipping the next day's run, and a fixed-time trigger shows its time (#1032).
An import from Irrigation Unlimited calculates the steps that IU's own adjustments fed, and says when the main program would water the same zones next to it, or when IU is not running at all (#1034).
Removing the integration removes its data; a new zone never takes the id, entities and history of a deleted one (#1002, #1015).
Saving a setting no longer takes a weather reading (#955), the planning no longer shows a run a step's minimum deficit will skip (#971), and the zone, Start, the card and the planning agree on the next watering (#969).
Enabling direct valve control adds the watering buttons at once (#992, #993).

Thank you

This release is as much @johnnyh1975's as ours. Johnny reviewed the whole panel screen by screen, wrote the glossary that gave every thing one name, walked through fresh installs and real watering with each candidate, reviewed the CI, built the Irrigation Unlimited import, and sent close to fifty pull requests, each with its tests and a careful write-up. Smart Irrigation is a team now, and a much better product for it. Thank you, Johnny.

Thank you @Megalos for testing every pre-release and for reports precise enough to fix on the first read, and @lweberru, @NickWick13 (Swedish), @misa1515 (Slovak), @jubudu and @Moharmate for your contributions and reports. And thank you to everyone who translates Smart Irrigation on Weblate.

Updating

In HACS, update Smart Irrigation, restart Home Assistant, and reload the browser so the panel is the new one. If an automation of yours calls an old action name, Repairs will tell you which.