"Turn on every light downstairs except the kitchen" has so far meant giving up on the floor as a target and listing each light by hand. Home Assistant now has a way around that. A set of changes merged on 22 October 2026 adds exclusions to the targets of actions, triggers and conditions. The code is in the development branch, so it should ship with
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
Home Assistant can hand Wi-Fi credentials to a new Shelly device over Bluetooth, so you don't have to join the device's own access point from your phone. Until now the last screen of that flow asked two questions: whether to switch off the device's Wi-Fi access point and whether to switch off Bluetooth RPC once the device was on the network. A chan
Assist, the voice assistant built into Home Assistant, can run without any cloud service. A voice command then goes through four stages on your own hardware: wake word detection, speech-to-text, the conversation agent that works out what you meant, and text-to-speech for the reply. Home Assistant calls this chain a pipeline, and each stage can use
Getting a CO2 reading out of a Sensirion SCD41 takes about ten lines of ESPHome YAML. Keeping that reading honest over months is the harder part. The sensor corrects its own drift with an algorithm that makes assumptions about your room, and if the room doesn't meet them, the numbers slowly move away from reality without any error in the logs. Wiri
Z-Wave JS UI 11.25.0 came out on 21 October 2026. Most of the changes concern its MQTT gateway with Home Assistant discovery, the setup where Z-Wave JS UI publishes entities to a broker instead of talking to the Z-Wave JS integration over WebSocket. If you use the WebSocket route, the release still brings a Node 24 Docker image and a handful of int
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
zigpy 2.4.0, the Zigbee library underneath Home Assistant's ZHA integration, was released on 21 October 2026. Two changes matter for ZHA users: the library now batches its database writes, and it has a working Green Power runtime, the part of the Zigbee standard used by battery-free switches. Neither reaches Home Assistant until ZHA moves to the ne
