The first alpha of v2026.11.1: a simplification cycle. This is for the curious. If your garden depends on Smart Irrigation and you do not want surprises, stay on v2026.11.0.
Why this release
Feature after feature, and despite the recent, much-needed reorganisation of the panel, Smart Irrigation had become hard to digest. Too many buttons, settings that said the same thing in two places, a lot of text, and several features doing similar jobs side by side. It had become difficult to picture, in your head, what would actually happen in the garden.
So this cycle is mostly about taking things away, and about showing rather than explaining. Then a few things were added, where they replace an automation you had to write yourself.
What happens when you update
Nothing to do. Your watering goes on as before, at the same moment.
- One setting says what Smart Irrigation does: Calculate and water, Calculate only or Stop everything, at the top of Settings.
- If Smart Irrigation opened your valves (direct valve control, with or without the full controller), the installation moves to Calculate and water once, on its own. Your start trigger becomes a schedule of the main program: "done by sunrise" stays done by sunrise, a sunset with an offset keeps its offset, a fixed time stays that time. A notice in Settings > Repairs tells you so.
- If an automation of yours does the watering, you are on Calculate only, and the start event fires as before.
- One thing behaves differently with Calculate and water: when Home Assistant starts, a valve found open with no Smart Irrigation run behind it is closed.
Less
One choice instead of five switches. The full controller switch, direct valve control, the main program's "Program on", the "None" start trigger and the start trigger card of the Watering tab each started or stopped the watering on their own. The list at the top of Settings replaces them all. The start triggers stay for Calculate only, where they fire the start event your automation listens to.
Fewer settings that say the same thing
- A program's "wait between steps" is now each step's own wait. A program saved with one hands it to each step that had none, so the run is planned exactly the same.
- A schedule's weather is one list: all the conditions, only some of them (the checkboxes, no longer hidden under "More options"), or no.
- The engines page is gone. It edited what the zone card edits, and could only be reached by its address. "Coastal", which only it had, is now on the zone (advanced panel).
- Observed watering is switched on by Calculate and water. Switching it by hand is on the advanced panel.
- Every "Enabled" row is gone. A switch now sits on the right of the title it turns on: the rain, frost and wind checks, each pump, each seasonal adjustment, the calculation log, the blueprints.
- In the YAML editor, the button that opened it reads "Back to the editor", and the second "Cancel" is gone.
Less text. Every explanation is now behind a small round "i" next to its title or label, read on hover, on focus or with a tap. What tells you the state of things stays in sight: warnings, a run in progress, the planning.
New
A program drawn as a flow. Next to its timeline, each program shows what it does from top to bottom: what starts it, the weather check ("otherwise nothing that day"), the pumps and main valves with their lead time, each step with its valves side by side and their water, the passes and the soak between them, the wait or the overlap between steps, the rounds, and the notification. The zones with nothing to water right now are shown faded rather than left out. It follows the form and the YAML as you edit them, and a valve opens its zone.
The next days at a glance. The Watering tab opens on 3, 7 or 14 days, one row per day, each run a block in its program's colour: soaks hatched, a run the weather may hold back faded, a run that waits behind another placed where it will really go. Hover a block for its zones, click it to open its program.
Being told. A program can notify people when it has watered: a phone of the companion app, any notify entity, or a notification in Home Assistant. Three choices: at the start and at the end, only at the end, or only when something goes wrong. Problems are always sent with high priority: a valve that did not close, a zone set aside, a pump that failed, a leak. For many of you, this replaces the "watering report" automation you wrote yourself.
Watching the hardware
- Set a zone aside: after a number of failed runs in a row (the valve did not open, gave no water, or its own timer could not be set), a zone is no longer watered. A repair notice says so, with a button to put it back. It also comes back on its own once its valve is seen opening. Advanced panel, off by default.
- Leak: a zone's water meter that counts while every valve is closed raises a repair notice, a
smart_irrigation_leakevent and a hub binary sensor, so an automation can close a main valve. Advanced panel, off by default. - Observed watering: a binary sensor on the hub says whether it is on, and a zone can leave very short runs out of its water balance (thanks @HennieMouton, #1012).
Configuring differently
- YAML: every program can be edited as YAML, the main one included, with a live preview of what it would do. The main program's YAML also holds the order of the zones, the passes, the soak and the pause between zones.
- Assistants: Smart Irrigation offers itself to Home Assistant's own Model Context Protocol Server and to Assist. Tick it there, and Claude, ChatGPT or your conversation agent can read and set up zones, sensor groups, settings and programs, and explain why a zone was not watered. There is nothing to switch on in Smart Irrigation, and no tool ever starts a watering or opens a valve. See Assistants (AI). This also answers #1042 (thanks @ThieryPeleias).
- A schedule at a bearing of the sun: start, or be done, when the sun reaches a given azimuth, for a bed the shade of a wall leaves at that moment.
- The setup assistant now asks, with the first zone, what Smart Irrigation should do, and asks every zone for the valve that waters it.
From the community
- @johnnyh1975: the run says what it is doing between passes, during the pump start and in the queue (#1028); the program editor says what a step does, and an overlap counts from the valves (#1029); the planning shows a morning's runs in the order they water, and what is watered twice (#1030); a valve that closes after its own duration is given the length of each pass (#1033).
- @Megalos: hourly calculation takes Open-Meteo's own hourly values for the inputs a sensor group reads from it, and its sensors for the rest (#961); a zone can skip a watering rather than open its valve without the valve's own timer (#893).
- Traditional Chinese (Taiwan), thanks @monarchsofchaos004-gif (#1040), and Ukrainian updated through Weblate (#1039).
Fixed
- A step with a minimum deficit of its own watered a zone held back that day by its days between irrigation.
- "Shorten runs after rain" went on acting, out of sight, once the rain sensor check that shows it was switched off.
- A schedule's "days since the last watering" condition showed as off when the general setting was 0, although zones with days of their own were held back.
- The main program no longer speaks of a start trigger it does not use, and a schedule on all seven days reads "every day".
Tell us
This is a big change for anyone who knows the panel by heart. Does it feel lighter, or did we hide something you use? The discussion is here: #1045. Even "it was better before" is welcome 🌱