ha-netro-watering

Netro Smart Garden Integration for Home Assistant

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📑 Table of Contents

ℹ️ About

Home Assistant integration for Netro Smart Garden devices. It lets you manage Netro controllers and soil sensors to monitor conditions, control zones, and automate watering from Home Assistant.

The integration uses Netro’s Public API for device access and scheduling.

Compatibility: developed and tested with Home Assistant 2023.4.0 and later.

This project is community-maintained and not affiliated with Netro, Inc.

📖 Description

This integration connects your Netro controller and sensors to Home Assistant so you can view soil moisture and temperature and control watering schedules.

What you get:

Why use it

Notes

🌱 Installation

🛒 From HACS

  1. Install HACS if you haven’t already (see the installation guide).
  2. In Home Assistant, open HACS → Integrations, search for Netro Watering, and install it.
  3. Restart Home Assistant.
  4. Go to Settings → Devices & Services → Add Integration, search for Netro Watering, and add it.

📦 Manual

  1. Download and unzip the repo archive.
    (Alternatively, click Code → Download ZIP, or clone the repo.)
  2. Copy the integration into your config so that this path exists: 
    /config/custom_components/netro_watering/

    If the archive contains custom_components/netro_watering/, copy that folder as-is.

  3. Restart Home Assistant.
  4. Go to Settings → Devices & Services → Add Integration, search for Netro Watering, and add it.

⚙️ Configuration

Repeat step 4 for each device you want to include — whether a soil sensor, a multi-zone controller (Sprite or Spark), or a single-zone controller (Pixie).

Each zone managed by a controller is created as a separate device linked to that controller.

add a config entry device is created

After setup, you may see multiple devices and dozens of entities, including:

Polling intervals can be configured separately for sensors and controllers. A default watering duration can be set per controller. Advanced settings are available for both sensors and controllers.

change controller options change sensor options

ℹ️ Note You no longer need to reload the device after changing options. Changes are applied automatically.

🔐 Netro Public API v2

By default, the integration uses version 1 of the Netro Public API, which authenticates devices using their serial numbers. However, you can switch to version 2, which uses API keys generated on demand for each device.
API keys provide a higher level of security: they can be regenerated if compromised, unlike fixed serial numbers.

To use API v2, simply specify the corresponding URL in your Home Assistant configuration file:

netro_watering:
  netro_api_url: https://api.netrohome.com/npa/v2/

⚠️ Important:
Some recent Netro devices only work with API version 2.
If your device is rejected when using a serial number with API v1 (the default), carefully check the error message.
It may indicate that you need to use API v2 and an API key for authentication.

🌦️ Netro Weather Sync Blueprint

This blueprint allows you to synchronize your Netro smart watering system with current weather conditions using Home Assistant data. It dynamically adjusts watering schedules to prevent watering during rain or when humidity is high, helping you save water efficiently.

Installation (Import the Blueprint)

You can easily import this blueprint into your Home Assistant instance.

Quick import (recommended):
Import Blueprint into Home Assistant

Manual import (alternative):

  1. In Home Assistant, open Settings → Automations & Scenes → Blueprints → Import Blueprint.
  2. Paste the following URL into the Blueprint address field: 
      https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kcofoni/ha-netro-watering/main/blueprints/script/kcofoni/netro_weather_sync.yaml
  3. Click Preview, then Import.

How to Use

After importing the blueprint:

  1. Go to Settings → Automations & Scenes → Scripts.
  2. Click ➕ Create Script → Use Blueprint.
  3. Select Netro Weather Sync from the list.
  4. Configure the required inputs:
    • Netro Controller: select the controller entity to sync.
    • Weather Entity: select the source weather entity (e.g. weather.paris).
    • Rain Probability Entity (Optional): sensor entity for rain probability if available.
  5. Save the script, then run it manually or call it from an automation.

💡 Tips

🖼️ Lovelace cards

Here are some Lovelace cards used to control the watering system with this integration.

watering planning sensors charts calendar start

⏰ Example Automation

The Netro Watering entities may be integrated into automations. The following integration custom services are available:

call service

💧 Set moisture level

Netro’s irrigation planning algorithms use area layout, plant types, soil properties, weather forecasts, and current temperature and soil moisture to calculate watering. Netro’s soil sensors (the Whisperer model) provide the required moisture readings. If you don’t have Netro sensors but have other reliable soil sensors, you can provide their moisture level to Netro so it can use that information in its calculations.

The Set moisture service exposed by the integration can be called for a specific zone to report a custom moisture level.

set moistures

🌦️ Report weather

Netro supports receiving custom weather data, which can improve the accuracy of its watering schedules. The integration exposes a Report weather service that accepts common weather fields (temperature, humidity, rain amount, rain probability, min/max temperatures, wind speed, etc.).

You can create a small Home Assistant script or automation that gathers data from your preferred weather sensors or provider and calls this service. See the Netro Weather Sync Blueprint for a ready-to-use example that collects weather data and forwards it to Netro.

Note: the example below calls the script created by the Netro Weather Sync blueprint (for instance script.netro_weather_sync_meteo_france). If you imported the blueprint and created a script from it, use the script entity name generated by Home Assistant. Otherwise, create a script with that name or adapt the automation to call your own script/service.

Example automation (YAML)

alias: Synchro Netro Météo France
description: Update Netro with Météo France data twice daily
triggers:
  - at: "06:00:00"
    trigger: time
  - at: "18:00:00"
    trigger: time
actions:
  - action: script.netro_weather_sync_meteo_france
    data:
      number_of_days_forecast: ""
variables:
  number_of_days_forecast: 5

🛠️ Advanced configuration

You can configure a few general settings for the Netro Watering integration in Home Assistant’s configuration.yaml. These settings are optional and not tied to a specific device. The integration works well without them, but they can optimize behavior or cover specific use cases. If omitted, default values are used.

The following parameters were previously defined in the configuration file, but the UI options now take precedence for both sensors and controllers.

About the slowdown factor

As indicated in the documentation, the number of calls to the Public API of Netro is limited. Today, a maximum of 2,000 calls per day and per device is permitted and the counter is reset every day at midnight UTC. Netro does not provide mechanisms that reference a callback function, as do a number of similar systems, so that each event is notified as it occurs. For this reason, it is useful to frequently request the system to obtain a state of the situation, as faithful as possible to reality, at “t” time.

The configuration of a device (controller or sensor) within the UI makes it possible to define, as shown above, a specific polling frequency (refresh interval). One may wonder if this refresh period should be the same regardless of the time of day. There are indeed time slots on which there is no gain in polling the system very often (at night for example) and, conversely, times when watering is very likely and which requires close monitoring.

The slowdown factor (sdf) temporarily multiplies the controllers’ polling interval during specified time windows (sensors are not affected).

Formula: effective_polling_interval = base_interval × sdf

Times use 24-hour HH:MM format and can cross midnight (see first window below).

Example (configuration.yaml)

slowdown_factors:
  - from: '23:00'  # overnight: slow down while everyone sleeps
    to:   '05:55'
    sdf:  15       # polling interval ×15 in this window

  - from: '10:30'  # hottest/sunniest hours: fewer checks or only occasional watering
    to:   '17:00'
    sdf:  5        # e.g., if base is 2 min, becomes 10 min between 10:30 and 17:00

Outside the defined windows, the nominal polling interval is used. This approach allows a short nominal interval while selectively slowing controller polling at certain times of day.

Example of Netro configuration in configuration.yaml

netro_watering:
  delay_before_refresh: 5            # seconds
  default_watering_delay: 0          # start watering immediately
  sensor_value_days_before_today: 2  # use last readings up to "day before yesterday"
  slowdown_factors:
    - from: '23:00'  # overnight: slow down while everyone sleeps
      to:   '05:55'
      sdf:  15       # polling interval ×15 in this window
    - from: '10:30'  # hottest/sunniest hours: fewer checks
      to:   '17:00'
      sdf:  5        # e.g., base 2 min -> 10 min in this window
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