Home Assistant

2022.11: A heck of a release!

Franck Nijhof Comments

Home Assistant Core 2022.11! 🎉

This November already feels a lot like Christmas 🎄, what a heck of a release! Quite a few suggestions from the Month of “What the Heck?!” already landed! Ready to unpack the presents? 🎁

Talking about the WTH month, it ended. Well, sort of, at least. It is now closed for new topics/suggestions, but existing ones remain open for discussion and can be voted on. I’m curious to see more of these WTHs being resolved in the upcoming releases.

This release has so much goodness that I have a hard time picking a favorite. Water usage, maybe? I’m really not sure, so I’m going to cut this intro short. Let me know your favorite in the comments below!

Enjoy the release!

../Frenck

PS: There will be no release party live stream this month, instead join us at the State of the Open Home on Sunday, November 13, 2022 (11:00 AM PST / 20:00 CET).

Tile card

This release introduces a new Dashboard card: the “Tile”!

Screenshot showing a couple of tile cards

The tile card is a lovely little card that provides a quick overview of an entity. The icon can be tapped to toggle the entity, and the rest of the card brings up the “more info” dialog.

Read more about the Tile card in the documentation.

This first iteration of the Tile card is one of the first cards added this release, that brings in a new style of card into Home Assistant.

Curious to find out what else will be coming? Join us for the State of the Open Home live stream. Go to YouTube and click the bell 🔔 so you get notified when we go live!

Statistic card

More cards! We already have the Statistics Graph card, which can be used to display graphs of long-term statistics of an entity. This release brings the “Statistic” card!

The “Statistic” card, as the name implies, can show a single value of an entity, based on the long-term statistics stored of that entity.

For example, want to display the average temperature of your living room this week on your dashboard? The average power usage of your home today? The peak power production of your solar panels today?

Yes, all of the above, this card can do!

Screenshot showing the UI editor of the statistic card and all of its options

Read more about the Statistic card in the documentation.

Smarter reloading of automation & scripts

WTH do all automations get reloaded when you change any of them?

Good question! And that WTH topic got over 180+ votes as well!

When you change a single automation or script via the editors in the user interface (or reload your YAML-based ones), they all get reloaded. This means if they are running, waiting for something (a delay, an event, or for an entity to be in a certain state for X time), they would all be reset.

This release changes this behavior, resolving that WTH! Only automations that are actually changed are reloaded. All others will remain running and untouched.

This works when editing an automation in the UI, and even when reloading your YAML-based automations in any split YAML setup you might have.

Oh, as an added bonus: We applied the exact same for scripts too!

Getting insights into water usage

Since Home Assistant added energy management, tracking the usage of water🚰 has been requested quite a bit. It was raised again during this month of WTH, and with over 370 votes, it is clearly wanted a lot.

This release adds the ability to monitor your water usage in the energy dashboard!

Although water is not strictly “energy”, it is still a valuable resource to track. It is often tightly coupled with energy usage (like gas) when using hot water, and the gained insight can help you reduce your ecological footprint by using less water 🌎.

The energy dashboard now includes your water usage

Some integrations, like Flo, Flume, and HomeWizard Energy, have been adjusted to support tracking water. Furthermore, you can create your own using templates, MQTT, or ESPHome (requires ESPHome version 2022.10.1 or newer).

Check out the documentation for the hardware options available to track your water usage or how to build your own water usage sensors.

Color temperatures in Kelvin

Another WTH topic that was voted for almost 150 times! Why doesn’t Home Assistant use Kelvin for color temperatures?

Well, a small piece of history: The Home Assistant story started using Philips Hue a long, long time ago. And Hue uses mired for its color temperature, not Kelvin.

But today, Kelvin is much more commonly used. It is even on packages of the bulbs you buy. So, as of today, Home Assistant uses Kelvin too!

Screenshot showing the UI now uses the Kelvin unit to set the color temperature

Kelvin is now the primary color temperature unit. This means all lights and everything color temperature related shown in the user interface, are now in Kelvin.

We still do support the good old mired. Mireds are still working and automatically converted when needed, so this is not a breaking change 🎉

Additionally, integrations can now optionally use Kelvin directly if the device or service accepts that. HomeKit, Shelly, AVM FRITZ!SmartHome, and LIFX are all now using Kelvin natively.

Long-term statistics in the entity dialogs

The “more info” dialogs of entities now use long-term statistics for the graphs shown. It makes those dialogs a lot faster, especially on mobile devices.

Screenshot showing you can now set the day of the week from your user profile page

The first day of the week

The start of the week can differ for many of us. Your week will start on Saturday, Sunday, or Monday based on where you are, your locale, or maybe personal preference. As pointed out in this WTH topic.

Home Assistant will try to auto-detect the correct day to start the week based on information provided by your browser. However, if it cannot detect it, or in case you have a personal preference, you can now set it on your user profile.

Screenshot showing you can now set the day of the week from your user profile page

You can now set the day to start the week at in your user profile.

Setting it means that all date inputs, date range pickers, schedules, calendars, and even time conditions in automations, will take this into account when displaying weeks.

New templating features

We also have some great new advanced features added to templating this release!

Originating from this WTH topic: You can now use the state_attr() and states() functions as a filter, and the is_state() and is_state_attr() functions can now be used as tests.

The average() function now accepts a default value, which can be helpful if no average can be calculated.

Lastly, the config_entry_id() template method has been added, which allows you to look up native IDs of integration configuration entries using one of the entities it provides.

For more information on these new features and the Home Assistant templating capabilities in general, check out the documentation.

Other noteworthy changes

There is much more juice in this release; here are some of the other noteworthy changes this release:

  • The default dashboard theme has been adjusted to move a little closer to the new Material Design 3 guidelines. Borders around cards are now outlined (instead of having a shadow), and corners are a little more rounded.
  • The automations and the devices dashboards now have icons on each row, making them look all nice and shiny. Thanks, @bramkragten & @frenck.
  • The unit of measurement for entities providing Gas can now be changed and converted from the UI. Thanks, @emontnemery!
  • Home Assistant is now discoverable via UPnP/SSDP, meaning your instance will show up in your Windows Network. Thanks, @StevenLooman!
  • Shelly Gen2 devices that sleep (battery-powered) are now supported! Thanks, @thecode!
  • You can now use sensors providing Gigajoule (GJ) with the energy dashboard. Thanks, @emontnemery!
  • The MQTT integration now has support for update entities! Thanks, @bieniu!
  • Media player support was added to the Jellyfin integration. Thanks, @Ongy!
  • The statistics card now supports “week” as a possible period. Thanks, @mib1185!
  • The Sun condition can now handle setting both before & after at the same time. Thanks, @janick!
  • The “forked-daapd” project was renamed to “Owntone”. The integration was now renamed Owntone too! Thanks, @uvjustin!
  • Fully Kiosk Browser now provides a service to remotely change URLs on your wall-mounted tablet. Thanks, @cgarwood!
  • The Xiaomi Miio integration now supports the Xiaomi Purifier 4 Lite and the Roborock S7 MaxV. Thanks, @alexdrl & @starkillerOG!
  • The UniFi integration now provides individual PoE control per port for the client and device PoE (switches are disabled by default). Thanks, @Kane610!
  • The HomeKit Controller integration now supports encrypted Bluetooth notifications, reducing state change latency and the number of active BLE connections made to devices.
  • When setting up a new Generic Camera, you will be presented with a preview of the camera showing you if it works. Nice! Thanks, @davet2001!
  • Support for unique_ids was added to the following (YAML capable) integrations:

New Integrations

We welcome the following new integrations in this release:

Integrations now available to set up from the UI

The following integrations are now available via the Home Assistant UI:

Release 2022.11.1 - November 3

Release 2022.11.2 - November 8

Release 2022.11.3 - November 16

Release 2022.11.4 - November 20

Release 2022.11.5 - November 30

Need help? Join the community!

Home Assistant has a great community of users who are all more than willing to help each other out. So, join us!

Our very active Discord chat server is an excellent place to be at, and don’t forget to join our amazing forums.

Found a bug or issue? Please report it in our issue tracker, to get it fixed! Or, check our help page for guidance for more places you can go.

Are you more into email? Sign-up for our Building the Open Home Newsletter to get the latest news about features, things happening in our community and other news about building an Open Home; straight into your inbox.

Backward-incompatible changes

Below is a listing of the breaking change for this release, per subject or integration. Click on one of those to read more about the breaking change for that specific item.

If you are a custom integration developer and want to learn about breaking changes and new features available for your integration: Be sure to follow our developer blog. The following are the most notable for this release:

All changes

Of course, there is a lot more in this release. You can find a list of all changes made here: Full changelog for Home Assistant Core 2022.11