Home Assistant 2026.1: New Dashboard, Triggers, Devices & Energy Updates Explained

Hi! And so here we are at the end of 2025.

The beta release of Home Assistant 2026.1

is now available and I will show you what

it brings to the table. It's a minor release

because developers deserve a holiday too,

but still, there's enough to show. Let's get

started!

Here we are at the home dashboard of Home

Assistant, which you can generate automatically

in Home Assistant. And some things have been

changed to the mobile version of it. So let's

make it smaller. And what you can see here

is now we have an option "summaries" here.

And that shows the amount of lights that are

on the status of your climate, security, media

players, weather and today's energy. So if

I click on "lights", I get an overview of

all my lights. Of course I get a lot of

errors because this is my test environment. And if

I click on "climate", I get an overview of

all my climate entities, etc. Well, let's

say the weather and whether you see the

weather card. And that's it. Another thing that has

been added to the home dashboard is this

"devices" option. So if I click on "devices", then it

will open and it will show me all the

devices that I have in my system. And there's a lot

of them, so it takes some time to load it.

So that is also new. So I can go quickly to

all the devices in my own system. Next to

that, if we go to Home Assistant to "labs",

and I've showed this in the previous video

because it was released in the December release,

then you can turn on purpose-specific

triggers and conditions. If you have turned that on,

you get a different interface in the automations

interface. So I go to "automations and scenes".

I'm going to create a new automation. And

what has been added this month is that there

are new triggers added. So I'm going to

trigger and if I, for instance, search for "button",

I see there's now a trigger "button pressed" and I

can select all the button entities in my system here.

Okay. The same goes for "climates".

I have a lot of triggers for climate now.

Climate control device started heating. Climate control

device turned off. So I can choose that and

then I can choose a target and I get to see all my

climate devices here. That's also really handy. Okay.

Another one that has been added is "device tracker".

Now I see "entered home" and "left home". So if I click "entered home",

I can choose a target. For instance, my phone "iPhone X" and I can see when I

entered my home now using this trigger. And another

trigger has been added and that is for "humidifier".

Those are these triggers. I do not have a

humidifier myself, but you can trigger now on

when humidifier started drying or when the humidifier turned off, etc.

Another one that has been added is a light

trigger. And now we have triggers for light turned off,

light turned on, light brightness changed,

light brightness crossed, threshold and alarm

armed night. Not sure if this should be there, but okay, it is there. Okay.

Next to the automation, there's been added

something to settings and you might have already

seen it when I switched to "labs". Oh, let's not

save this. So there's now a section here that shows

a link to all my protocols. For instance, "Matter",

or I can go to "Bluetooth" or I can go to my tags.

And this is shown based on which protocol is

enabled in my system. So you can see more or

less in your system, if that's the case. Then

the last thing that has been added is in the

energy dashboard, there is now a date picker at

the bottom of this screen, which is always visible.

That was the thing that people were complaining

about, that it wasn't always visible. So now I

can go easily to another date. So for instance,

to yesterday. Well, of course, there's no data

because this is my test server. I can go back to

today and I get all my daily data back. So that's

basically the things that have been added to Home

Assistant in the 2026.1 release. But there's more.

Of course, there are integrations, new integrations for Air Patrol, eGuage,

Fluss+, Fish Audio, Fressnapf Tracker. I'm not

sure if I'm pronouncing that correctly, to be honest.

Home Link, Watts Vision+ and Web RTC. Well,

you can go through this list using the link in the

description of my video. There's also

improvements to existing integrations. Let's see, Matter, Smart

Things, Fritzbox, OpenAI. Well, again, you can go

to this list yourself. And there is, of course,

other noteworthy changes. For, let's see, there's

a gallons per day unit now. There's also a volume

control support for the Matter integration. There's

a statistic graph card, it includes a link to the

history panel now, etc, etc. So those are the

things that also have been added as noteworthy changes.

And of course, we also have backward

incompatible changes, for instance, for Cool Master, Tail

Scale, Unified Protect, Telegram Bot or

VeSync. So if you make use of these, or one of these,

go through them, read the release notes and do

not get surprised when you install this new version

of Home Assistant and something doesn't work

anymore. So you might find the information right here.

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in the video description. I'll see you soon in my next video. Bye bye!