Many cheap smart plugs measure power with an HLW8012 or BL0937 chip, which reports watts, volts and amps as streams of pulses. ESPHome counts those pulses with its software pulse counter, and on plugs built around Beken or Realtek chips under LibreTiny that counting has long been unreliable. Pull request #21271, merged into ESPHome's development br
Home Assistant has a new BLUETTI Modbus integration. It reads a BLUETTI power station over its local Modbus TCP interface, so it keeps working when the internet or BLUETTI's cloud is down, and according to its author it gets several values faster than the cloud API. The pull request by chpego was merged on 22 October 2026, after the integration had
The Template integration in Home Assistant is getting a new platform: water_heater. The change was merged on 22 October 2026, and its documentation went into the next branch two days later, which puts it on track for Home Assistant 2026.11. It fills a gap that hot water owners know well. A boiler driven by a relay, an ESPHome board or a heat pump i
Forecast.Solar has always assumed that solar panels stay where they were installed. On 21 October 2026 a change was merged into Home Assistant's development branch that drops that assumption, so it is lined up for the 2026.11 release. The integration can now follow Home Assistant's home location and read the tilt and direction of each panel group f
Aqara has added an outdoor smart plug to its European range. The Outdoor Plug H2 EU (model SP-P06E) was announced on the Aqara forum on 20 October 2026, and Aqara's EU store lists it at €32.99. According to HomeKit News, the standard model can already be ordered from Amazon in Germany, France, Spain and Italy. There is also an RGB version with a mu
Two fixes merged into Home Assistant Core on 20 October 2026 make the cost sensors of the Energy dashboard more reliable. One prices the energy used while Home Assistant was stopped, the other handles a meter that changes its unit. Both come from Petar Petrov (MindFreeze), were reviewed by Abílio Costa (abmantis), and went into the dev branch that
Home Assistant is getting a KACO RS485 integration for KACO Powador solar inverters of the xi range, such as the Powador 6400xi and 8000xi. These inverters have no network port and no cloud service, so apart from their display, the only way to read them is the RS485 serial bus the integration polls. Joost Lekkerkerker merged pull request #182109 by
A fix merged into ESPHome's development branch on 17 October 2026 at 00:55 UTC removes a source of bad energy statistics for anyone who reads a French electricity meter with the teleinfo component. Until now, a value that could not be parsed as a number was published as 0. It is now logged as a warning and skipped. The change is pull request #20960
ESPHome's pylontech component, which reads Pylontech home storage batteries over their console port, has so far reported each battery as a whole: voltage, current, state of charge, temperatures, and the voltages of its lowest and highest cell. From ESPHome 2026.11 it can also report the voltage and temperature of every cell. The pull request by fun
