Migrating your watering off Home Assistant

This guide is for people who run irrigation inside Home Assistant today, with integrations like Smart Irrigation, Irrigation Unlimited, the OpenSprinkler integration, or a vendor cloud (Rachio, Hydrawise, B-hyve), and want LocalSky to become the watering brain while HA stays the dashboard.

The end state looks like this:

• LocalSky computes everything: ET from your weather, per-zone soil buckets, skip rules, and the morning schedule.
• LocalSky talks to your controller directly (OpenSprinkler, Rachio, Hydrawise, B-hyve, Rain Bird, MQTT), so watering works even when HA is down.
• Home Assistant keeps everything it had, through one integration: the LocalSky integration publishes every sensor, zone valve, forecast, and the run/stop/pause services as native HA entities.
• The old HA-side irrigation stack is removed, so your HA instance stops carrying duplicate logic and orphaned entities.

Nobody’s setup is identical; treat the steps as a checklist and skip what doesn’t apply.

Phase 1: Stand LocalSky up next to what you have

Nothing breaks in this phase; you’re adding, not replacing.

1. Install LocalSky (Docker or the binary) and run the setup wizard: location, weather sources, your controller, zones.
2. Controller: add it natively (the wizard can scan it for stations). This does not interfere with an existing HA integration reading the same hardware; both can watch it at once.
3. Sensors: if some sensors only exist in HA (a Zigbee soil probe, a Z-Wave rain gauge), add an HA passthrough source (kind = "ha_passthrough") and map those entities. Everything else (Tempest, Ecowitt, forecast models) comes in natively. See sensors.md for a worked example.
4. Install the LocalSky integration in HA, following hacs.md. Two gotchas: it is not in the HACS default catalog yet, so add https://github.com/silenthooligan/localsky-hacs as a HACS custom repository first; and if your LocalSky has an owner account, create an API token in LocalSky (Settings > Account) before adding the integration, because the config flow asks for it. After that, it discovers the instance on your network; entities appear immediately.

Phase 2: Watch them disagree

Run both brains side by side for a few days. LocalSky’s Irrigation tab shows tonight’s plan, every zone’s verdict, and the “why” behind each number (Settings has a Simulator and Rule Lab for what-ifs). Compare against what your HA setup decides. Tune species, soil texture, and sprinkler rates in LocalSky’s zone settings until you trust its plan.

Expect a few settling days before the numbers converge. LocalSky’s per-zone water buckets start at field capacity on a fresh install (the model assumes the soil starts full), so the first plans can be smaller than what your old system would water until daily ET draws the buckets down to their real level. Don’t tune against day one; give the model several days of weather, rain, and recorded runs before comparing seriously.

While you’re watching, make sure the old system is the only one with a live schedule. LocalSky doesn’t actuate anything until its controller is enabled with zones assigned, but it’s worth confirming you don’t have two schedulers armed.

Phase 3: Flip the brain

1. Disarm the HA-side scheduler first so nothing double-waters:
   • Irrigation Unlimited: turn off the controller master switch (switch.irrigation_unlimited_c1_m) or set enabled: false on its schedules.
   • Smart Irrigation: disable the automation that applies its duration to your valves.
   • Vendor apps (Rachio/Hydrawise/B-hyve): disable the schedule in the vendor app; leave weather skip features off so they don’t fight LocalSky.
2. In LocalSky, confirm the controller is enabled and every zone is mapped to a station.
3. LocalSky schedules the next morning run automatically; the Irrigation tab shows when and why.
4. Watch one full watering cycle. The History tab records every run and skip with the reason.

Rollback is symmetric: re-enable the old schedule and disable LocalSky’s controller. Nothing in this guide deletes data until Phase 4.

When Home Assistant is unavailable

The point of the flip is that HA stops being a single point of failure for watering. What actually happens during an HA outage depends on which LocalSky pieces still touch HA:

Phase 4: Clean up Home Assistant

Once you trust LocalSky, remove the old stack so HA stops carrying noise. Order matters: dashboards first, then integrations, then leftovers.

1. Repoint dashboards and automations. Anything referencing the old integration’s entities (zone switches, “running” sensors, duration numbers) has a LocalSky equivalent entity now. Swap references before removing integrations so tiles don’t break.

2. Remove the integrations. Settings > Devices & services: remove the Smart Irrigation / OpenSprinkler / vendor config entries. For YAML-configured Irrigation Unlimited, delete its YAML block and restart.

3. Remove the HACS components. HACS > installed: remove Smart Irrigation, Irrigation Unlimited, and their dashboard cards (e.g. irrigation-unlimited-card) if nothing else uses them.

4. Sweep for orphans. Settings > Entities, filter by the old integration names; HA marks removed integrations’ leftovers as unavailable. Remove them. Developer tools > Statistics also lists orphaned long-term statistics you can purge.

   Purging statistics is irreversible. Once you delete an entity’s long-term statistics, years of recorded history for that entity are gone with no undo. If any of it matters (seasonal water usage comparisons, ET history), export it first, or just leave the orphans; they cost almost nothing.

5. Keep: the LocalSky integration, and the HA passthrough source only if it still feeds sensors that exist nowhere else.

What about the controller’s own HA integration?

After the flip, an OpenSprinkler/Rachio/Hydrawise HA integration is redundant: LocalSky publishes the same zones and state, and having two write paths to the hardware invites conflicting commands from old dashboard buttons. Recommended: repoint dashboards to the LocalSky entities and remove the controller’s HA integration. Keep it only if you have automations that talk to controller features LocalSky doesn’t expose.

Quick mapping reference