The topic The new Maintenance dashboard is the Home Assistant feature I did not know I needed is currently the subject of lively discussion — readers and analysts are keeping a close eye on developments.
This is taking place in a dynamic environment: companies’ decisions and competitors’ reactions can quickly change the picture.
With each monthly update, Home Assistant receives new and intriguing features. Some are useful from the get-go, while others often go unappreciated, despite their convenience. The radio frequency platform, IR support, and voice satellite fall under the former category, as they’re game-changers when it comes to managing smart gizmos.
Meanwhile, the Maintenance dashboard and, by extension, the tiny overhauls for each pre-configured dashboard, are the underrated aspects of the May update. But if you’ve got a bunch of sensors and smart devices that run on batteries, you’ll find the Maintenance dashboard a worthy addition to the HASS ecosystem.
Local LLMs made my Home Assistant setup far more responsive than any app or integration
As a tinkerer who’s a member of both the home lab and smart home fronts, I’ve got everything from presence detection sensors and sound bars to UPS units and power stations in my living space. And just as you’d expect, I’ve configured a bunch of automations for them.
But considering all the outages in my backwater town, it’s not uncommon for the low-priority devices in my arsenal to run out of juice. Heck, even without blackouts, I sometimes forget about recharging the standalone battery-powered devices. The result? Once these devices run out of battery, they get disconnected from my Home Assistant node, meaning all the trigger-action chains involving them become broken as well.
For simple automation flows, it might not be a big deal. But when it comes to long chains spanning different devices with multiple “And if” conditions, a single disconnected gizmo can cause a well-functioning trigger-action workflow to fail. That’s before you include the extra pain when you read the entire activity to troubleshoot the faulty node on a massive Node-RED canvas, only to realize a dead battery was responsible for the failed automation. If you’re wondering, then yes, I speak from experience.
The Maintenance dashboard is a lot like the Lights and Security tabs added back in 2025, except it only displays the battery-powered entities instead of lights or security logs. Essentially, every smart home device with a battery sensor, be it an ol’ IoT product, a server machine, or even a smartphone armed with the HASS companion app, gets pulled into the dashboard, and everything is neatly grouped based on the areas where you’ve placed said gizmos.
On paper, it’s a fairly simple addition. But the fact that it’s built into Home Assistant and automatically aggregates new battery entities makes it really useful, as I can just scour through the battery percentages at a glance. Heck, it even highlights the entities if they’re starting to run out of juice, so I don’t have to go around looking for under-charged devices, either. I’ve pinned the Maintenance dashboard to the navigation bar on my HASS instance, but if you’ve just installed the May 2026 update, you’ll find it within the Built-in section of the Dashboards tab inside the Home Assistant Settings page.
Although the Maintenance dashboard is my favorite addition (besides RF support, of course) of the May 2026 update, the other UIs have received a bunch of QoL overhauls. The Security dashboard, for instance, has a new activity log that displays a brief record of all the entity changes for security-centric appliances, including garage doors being unlocked, smart locks getting deactivated, and even surveillance cameras detecting motion (though you might want to tweak the filters and masks on the last one to avoid false positives from ruining your day).
In fact, even the DIY dashboard elements have received minor (yet worthwhile) updates. The shortcut tile card is a new UI element whose sole purpose is to launch other entities, be it another dashboard, a voice assistant pipeline, any ol’ smart home action, or even an external URL. Besides being able to modify the order of the playback buttons, the media player card now lets you choose between different sources, which is really handy when you’ve got as many devices and media sources hooked up to your projector as I do.
Even the automation trigger fields have become more convenient to use, especially for workflows where I want the “Then do” action to trigger only after a specific amount of time has passed for the “If” condition. And we’d be here all day if I went about listing the updates for my favorite integrations.