altmenorg/HAsmartirrigation v2026.9.3-beta1

on GitHub

This is a pre-release. HACS only offers it if you have enabled beta versions. It is a large batch: the panel is reorganised, a dashboard card arrives, and the way values are stored changes for installations in imperial units. The things that change what you see or what is stored are listed first.

Read this first

• Installations in imperial units: your zone values are converted once. Depths, rates, area and flow are now stored in metric and converted only where they are shown or entered. Nothing changes on screen and nothing changes in the calculation: the same numbers are shown, in the same units, and a zone waters exactly as before. The conversion happens on the first load and is recorded, so it never runs twice, and a backup taken before it is converted when restored. Going back to an older version after this would misread those values, so if you try this beta and want to return to v2026.9.2, restore a backup taken before the update. Metric installations have nothing to convert.
• Every zone now has its own calculation engine. An engine carries settings a zone owns, how many days it looks ahead and the fixed amount it uses, and zones used to share one: changing one of those on a zone changed it on every zone calculated the same way, silently. Each zone is given a copy of the engine it was already using, with its settings, so nothing changes about what any zone computes.
• The panel has four tabs instead of ten: Home, Zones, Data, Settings. Nothing is removed and every address still works; a group opens its first page and shows the others on a second row. The engines page has left the navigation, because an engine is no longer something to create by hand.
• The panel has a standard and an advanced mode. The advanced one shows the settings that tune the model: drainage, thresholds, multiplier, how far ahead a zone looks. An installation that already has zones stays on the advanced panel, since those settings were chosen on purpose; a new one starts on the standard panel. The switch is under Settings, and nothing is lost either way.

A dashboard card

Smart Irrigation now ships a card for your own dashboard, served and registered by the integration: no HACS install, no resource to add by hand. Look for Smart Irrigation in the card picker.

It shows what each zone is short of, how long it would run, when the water goes on and why it would not, with a button to water a zone on the spot (two taps, since one tap on a dashboard is easy to do by mistake). The deficit it shows is the live estimate, recomputed over the readings collected since the last calculation, not last night's result. It has a visual editor, a compact mode that keeps only the zones that would water, and it speaks English and French.

Documentation: the dashboard card.

Hour by hour, for everyone

The hourly calculation (Settings > General, still off by default) used to need a radiation sensor and no forecast days. Both are gone:

• Without a radiation sensor, the sun of each hour is read from Open-Meteo's own hourly history, which measures it rather than guessing it from the day's temperature range. On OpenWeatherMap or Pirate Weather, the same history answers through the fallback those services already use for radiation.
• With forecast days, the coming days are read hour by hour too, each priced as its own 24 hours, and the measured window joins the same average as the rate per day it implies. The arithmetic is the one the daily equation does, with every term hourly.
• A greenhouse is never asked for a sky forecast, and a day the forecast does not cover from end to end is not counted: in either case the daily equation stands, so no zone is ever left without a calculation.

The panel answers in words

• A zone says how it is calculated, in plain terms: calculated by Smart Irrigation, provided by a sensor or a service, or a fixed amount. No algorithm is named anywhere, and the engine behind it is created and reused for you.
• A zone says what it is doing before it says its numbers: it will water for so long at the next start, it has what it needs, it waters only when asked.
• The soil and what grows there are chosen in words: sandy, loam, clay, lawn, vegetables, vines. Each choice writes the drainage rate or the crop coefficient it stands for (FAO-56 values), which is what nobody can answer in millimetres an hour. Your own numbers still win if you set them.
• The Home page gives one answer, where it used to give four rows that managed to say "next run tomorrow at 07:58" and "nothing to water" at once.
• The days ahead are on the Home page, six of them, temperature and rain.
• Watering can be held back for 24 or 48 hours with one button, for rain the forecast missed. It ends by itself and resets nothing. Two services, postpone_irrigation and resume_irrigation, for automations.
• An installation that would never water says so. This integration calculates and something else acts on the result, so an installation can be correct, update its durations every night and never open a valve, in silence. Three cases are named on the Home page.
• A field you cannot type in says why, and an option that changes nothing for your sensor groups is not offered at all.

Fixes

• The Irrigation Unlimited sequence blueprint handed one zone's duration to the whole sequence, and IU spreads a sequence's time across its zones in proportion: a sequence of four zones ran about a quarter of what each needed. It adjusts one zone of the sequence now, one automation per zone.
• The watering calendar printed millimetres, litres and Celsius under those labels to an installation in imperial units.
• Zone devices no longer use the via_device parameter Home Assistant deprecated, which logged a warning on every start (#833).
• The card no longer says "no zones" while the integration is still starting, and a deficit of a hundredth of a millimetre is not called a deficit.

Under the hood

The panel is built on lit 3, and the build no longer carries Babel, which did nothing here: the bundle it produces is identical byte for byte. The frontend's committed bundle is now checked against its sources on every push, and it says what differs when it does not match.

Trying it

Enable beta versions for Smart Irrigation in HACS, update, and restart. The Home page is the fastest way to see what the integration thinks it is about to do. If something is wrong, an issue with a diagnostics file is the surest way to get it fixed, and if you use imperial units, a word either way is genuinely useful: that migration is the part of this release that deserves the most eyes.