Hey everyone today we would like to announce that development has begun on Android Auto. In December, Google has released an update to Android Auto and are finally accepting IoT apps into the Play Store. As you guessed the team wanted to get features added immediately. Check out the new upcoming features the team has already started to add!

These features are currently available in our beta channel and will be released to stable in the next 2 weeks.

Once you launch the app from your head unit you will have easy access to devices like your garage door, lights, locks and even scenes.

Tapping on a category allows you to see its entities and their state (with instant updates!). There are also simple touch controls to do things like opening the garage door before heading out.

In addition to selecting a domain you can also navigate to anything in Home Assistant that has a location, like persons, devices or sensors.

We have also added a new binary sensor allowing you to automate when you are in the car and connected to the head unit. There is an additional attribute for the type of connection as well.

A big thank you to Jbassett and jpelgrom for their contributions to the new Android Auto app. We look forward to the continued improvements to this new experience.

Happy New Year! 🍾

We wish you, and all the loved ones around you, all the best for 2023! 🥂

2023: What an exciting year this will be; The year of the voice! And not just that, many exciting things are expected this year. More spoilers can be found in the State of the Open Home 2022 recording on YouTube.

Starting this amazing year with: Home Assistant Core 2023.1! 🎊

A fairly small release, as we all enjoyed our Holidays. Yet, the first traces of the voice project are already visible: support for entity aliases!

Still, this release contains over 800 changes, most of which are quality improvements, bug and stability fixes, and other minor improvements. The perfect release to start the year with, an easy upgrade worth doing.

Enjoy the release!

../Frenck

PS: Did you know Home Assistant is now on Mastodon too?

TL;DR: It is our goal for 2023 to let users control Home Assistant in their own language. Mike Hansen, creator of Rhasspy, has joined Nabu Casa to lead this effort. We’re starting off by building a collection of intent matching sentences in every language.

Updates:

• Year of the Voice - Chapter 1 (January 26, 2023)
• Year of the Voice - Chapter 2 (April 27, 2023)
• Year of the Voice - Chapter 3 (July 20, 2023)
• Year of the Voice - Chapter 4 (October 12, 2023)
• Year of the Voice - Chapter 5 (December 13, 2023)
• Voice - Chapter 6 (February 21, 2024)
• Voice - Chapter 7 (June 26, 2024)
• Voice - Chapter 8 (December 19, 2024)
• Voice - Chapter 9 (February 13, 2024)

Usually, the month of December is meant to reflect back. However, we already did that last month when we hosted the State of the Open Home 2022. We didn’t only reflect, we also announced our focus for next year: 2023 is going to be the year of voice.

It is our goal for 2023 to let users control Home Assistant in their own language.

It’s a big and bold goal, but achievable given the right constraints. The amount of work laid out for us can be summarised as follows:

Our #1 priority is supporting different languages. There are enough projects out there trying to create an English voice assistant. But for us, that just doesn’t cut it. People need to be able to speak in their own language, as that is the most accessible and only acceptable language for a voice assistant for the smart home.

Home Assistant Core 2022.12! 🎄

Already the last release of the year, right on time to bring you some cool new features to work with during the upcoming Holidays!

2022 has been a fantastic year for the Home Assistant project. We became one of the world’s largest and fastest-growing GitHub open source projects! ❤️ Tons of new features each month, and not just that, we matured a lot! Everything became more stable and faster, and the UX made leaps forwards as well!

We looked back at 2022 during the State of the Open Home, and sneak peaked at 2023, with some great new UI concepts and: The year of the voice! 🗣️ Missed it? The full video is available on YouTube.

But! The year isn’t over yet! This release really Matters! We are thrilled to be one of the first in the world to roll out Matter support to the public! 🎉

No Matter devices yet? Don’t worry! There are tons of things in this release that will keep you busy. The Tile card got “features”! You can now extend your Bluetooth range using Shelly devices, and a long-requested feature lands: Local Calendar. 🤩

For 2022, this is it! Thank you for joining our community. Thank you for sharing, helping out, contributing, creating YouTube videos, blog articles, and podcasts.

Thank you for using Home Assistant! ❤️

Happy holidays and for the last time in 2022: Enjoy the release!

../Frenck

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).

Today we are excited to announce that Jasco has joined the Works with Home Assistant program as a Z-Wave partner.

Jasco is well known in the US for their Z-Wave switches and plugs. As a partner, Jasco and Nabu Casa will be working together to ensure the best experience for connecting Jasco Z-Wave devices to Home Assistant.

Jasco devices connect and integrate into Home Assistant using the Z-Wave integration (Z-Wave stick required). This means that connected Jasco devices work completely local and updates coming from the device are instantaneously reflected in Home Assistant. This allows for the best user experience when building your smart home.

One of Jasco’s claim to fame in the Home Assistant community is being the first company to provide firmware files (for 77 devices!) to the Z-Wave JS firmware update server. This service is used by Home Assistant to keep your devices secure. It is used to automatically detect if any of your Z-Wave devices have an updated firmware available and offer users to upgrade it.

Learn more about the Works with Home Assistant partner program.

Today we are excited to announce that Ultraloq by U-tec has joined the Works with Home Assistant program as a Z-Wave partner.

As a partner, U-tec and Nabu Casa will be working together to ensure the best experience for connecting Ultraloq Z-Wave smart locks to Home Assistant, including testing the actual products in the Nabu Casa labs.

Ultraloq smart locks connect and integrate into Home Assistant using the Z-Wave integration (Z-Wave stick required). This means that connected locks work completely local, and updates coming from the device are instantaneously reflected in Home Assistant. This allows for the best user experience when building your smart home.

Learn more about the Works with Home Assistant partner program.

Today we are excited to announce our next Works with Home Assistant partner: Third Reality!

Third Reality, Inc. is a smart home products company that has been working with Home Assistant for quite a long time but is now making it official. As a partner, Third Reality and Nabu Casa will be working together to ensure the best experience for connecting Third Reality Zigbee devices to Home Assistant.

Third Reality devices will connect and integrate into Home Assistant easily using the Zigbee Home Automation integration (Zigbee stick required). This means that the devices operate completely locally and state changes coming from the device are instantaneously picked up by Home Assistant. This allows for the best user experience when building a smart home.

Their smart home product portfolio includes switches, motion sensors, door sensors, water leak sensors, plugs, blinds, and newly added buttons. Giving users a full catalog of smart home products. For more information and products about Third Reality, you can visit their website.

If you missed the announcement of the Works with Home Assistant partner program, make sure to check out the blog post.

Happy October! October is always a special month for the project. It is the month everybody starts working on their home automations again, the month that Hacktoberfest brings in lots of new contributions and contributors to the project (👋 welcome!), and also this year: the Month of “What the Heck?!”.

The Month of WTH already looks very promising, and many good and interesting issues, ideas, and suggestions to streamline have been proposed. Keep those topics and votes going ❤️.

Oh! And Home Assistant Core 2022.10! 🎉

Last month’s release was a big one; this month’s release mostly continues to improving on that. I guess it is no surprise that the biggest improvement can be found (once again) in Bluetooth! There is a lot more, though this release is a bit “all over the place”, which is actually kinda nice.

Enjoy the release!

../Frenck

PS: I noticed the Home Assistant SkyConnect is now available for pre-order 🥳

Europe has entered an energy crisis and prices for electricity and gas are skyrocketing. Rates of €1/kWh and €3,40 per m³ of gas are not uncommon. People are turning to their friends in the Home Assistant community asking for help on how to save energy. With winter around the corner, they want a solution that they can apply before it gets really cold.

The goal of this post is to give an overview of things that Europeans can do to start saving energy and money today – even if they rent a home. The focus is on homes using radiators and a boiler connected to a thermostat.

Heating is a complicated topic and you will probably still have questions after reading this post. Don’t hesitate to join the Home Assistant community to discuss how to save energy (do make sure to search before asking a question). Join us in the forums in the energy category or come hang out in the #energy channel on our Discord chat server.

Take control of your heating

Most of your energy usage goes into heating your house in the winter.

Gas is more efficient than electricity to heat your house, unless you have a heat pump. So don’t turn off your gas heating and replace it with an electric heater as it will cost you a lot more money.

There are two ways of saving energy with heating. The first approach is to invest in more efficient technology to generate heat and improve the home insulation to stay warm. Things like getting a heat pump, improving insulation and getting thicker windows. Those things are not achievable before winter kicks in, so they are out of scope for this post.

The second way of saving energy is to use less of it. Governments have been advising to lower the overall temperature of your home, but putting the temperature too low can get a little too cold. Instead, you can be smarter about how you heat your home by installing smart thermostats, temperature sensors and thermostatic radiator valves (TRV).

Photo of a Shelly TRV

Smart Thermostats

A thermostat works by measuring the temperature. If the current temperature is below the target temperature set by the user, it turns on the heating until the home is the right temperature.

If you’re renting your home, you can skip this section as upgrading a thermostat is generally not an option.

The way a thermostat can help you save the most energy is by controlling the boiler, and preferably the boiler temperature. Heating the water is what drives the energy usage, so you wouldn’t want the boiler to heat the water to a higher temperature than is necessary to reach your target temperature.

Thermostats measure the temperature from the thermostat device. If the thermostat hangs in the last place in your home that gets warm, it might be heating more than you need. A smart thermostat can help by allowing you to pair extra temperature sensors to report the temperature in different rooms in your home. This allows the thermostat to turn off the heating earlier.

An extra bonus feature of a smart thermostat with remote control is that you’ll be able to change the temperature if you realize that you won’t be home at the scheduled time.

If you’re going to be in it for the long haul and want the easiest solution, you should invest in a smart thermostat that is part of a heating/cooling ecosystem that also has an API. Optimizing heating energy use is complicated and not something Home Assistant is good at out of the box. Instead, let that be managed by the ecosystem. The API allows you to still observe and influence it from Home Assistant to integrate presence and other data points the ecosystem is not aware of.

If you want full control over every part of heating your home, you don’t need to take the ecosystem route and instead invest in locally controllable thermostats, temperature sensors and TRVs and tie them together with Home Assistant. Here is an example to get started.

Recommended thermostats

It’s hard to give a single product recommendation here because there are so many different heating configurations and we are not aware of a single solution that works best in every case. Always check if the thermostat works with your boiler or other heating system you might use.

Home Assistant core developer Frenck researched this topic a couple of months ago for his own home and settled on Plugwise. It controls his boiler and radiators and has a local API to integrate with Home Assistant.

Another popular solution is Homematic IP. It too has a local API to integrate with Home Assistant.

Here at Home Assistant we prefer devices that work locally. Any device that stores your data in the cloud will eventually need a way to recoup the cost of hosting your data. It also means that if the company goes out of business, the devices tend to stop working. However, we understand that your priority today is saving energy. If the above solutions don’t work well for your home, you can also consider Netatmo or Tado.

We don’t recommend Google Nest because its ecosystem is not fully featured enough, as it does not support TRVs.

Thermostatic Radiator Valves (TRV)

A TRV will replace the existing knob on your radiator with a smart one. This works too if you rent: just swap the old knob back when you move out. Installation generally takes just 5 minutes.

A TRV works like the thermostat of your house, but at the level of your radiator: you set the temperature that you want to reach, and it will open/close your radiator to get to the controlled temperature.

Having a TRV allows you to tune the temperature in individual rooms based on your schedule and/or planned usage, like only heating up the bathroom in the morning and around bedtime.

TRVs should be used to opt a room in/out of heating. Because heating the water in your boiler is still the biggest use of your energy, you should not use TRVs to turn off all radiators in your home or to reduce the temperature throughout the home. This should be done at the boiler level (usually via the thermostat). Keeping your boiler at the right (and not too high) temperature required to heat your home to the desired temperature is the biggest energy saver move you can do.

Recommended TRVs

All three smart thermostats that we recommended are part of a product range that include TRVs. If you went with one of those, we suggest you stick to the ecosystem.

There are two devices that we recommend. Both work independently but also have a local API to allow plugging it into Home Assistant.

Shelly TRV

This device works standalone and does not require a hub. Battery life is claimed to be 2 years. It offers a local API and integrates perfectly with Home Assistant.

Buy Shelly TRV (affiliate link)

Aqara Smart Radiator Thermostat E1

The new kid on the block as it was just released. This TRV can be controlled directly from Home Assistant using Zigbee or via the Aqara hub. The hub can be locally integrated with Home Assistant via the HomeKit Controller integration.

Note: The vendor claims the device will support Matter in the future. It is unclear from their documentation if the device will speak Matter over Thread or that it will require their hub to expose the device over Matter. Our money is on the latter as that’s how they do HomeKit too.

Buy Aqara Smart Radiator Thermostat E1

Automations that can save energy

Once you’re able to control your thermostat and TRVs, you can start to save energy by automating your heating. Below are 5 useful automations to help with this.

Wrap up

Sadly, there is no golden solution to save energy that works for everyone everywhere. I hope that the above overview and tips will help you through the winter.

If some things are still not clear, don’t hesitate to join us in the forums in the energy category or come hang out in the #energy channel on our Discord chat server.