Home Assistant Starts Reporting Power Factor From Matter Devices
The 2026.10 release adds independent audible and visual alarm switches for Matter leak sensors, one-touch locking policy for locks, blind travel-time calibration, and frequency and power factor from power-measuring devices.
Home Assistant 2026.10 went into beta ahead of a stable release on 7 October, and the Matter-specific additions are more interesting than the version number suggests.
Supported Matter leak sensors now expose separate switches for their audible and visual alarms, and the two operate independently — changing the audible setting preserves the visual one, and vice versa. Named supported hardware is the IKEA KLIPPBOK water leakage sensor and Shelly's Flood Gen4 and Flood S Gen4. Compatible Matter locks gain a one-touch locking switch, controlling whether a single touch on the keypad can lock the door. Blind controls gain upward travel time, downward travel time and slat rotation time, with WAGO's Home Blind Control 2757-1105 (Wi-Fi) and 2757-1106 (Thread) named.
The addition with reach beyond the home is quieter: Matter devices that measure electrical power now report frequency and power factor. That turns a consumer-grade Matter plug or meter from a kWh totaliser into something marginally useful for load characterisation. Power factor is what tells you whether a load is behaving as expected, and its absence is a large part of why consumer energy monitoring has stayed decorative.
Elsewhere in the release: 15 new integrations, a redesigned map built on OpenStreetMap vector tiles, a new Modbus connection panel, a "Triggered by" automation condition that manages trigger IDs for you, LIFX support for lights connecting over Thread with working signal-strength sensors, and Homey Pro hardware among supported devices. The previous release, 2026.9, introduced a combined Matter and Thread network topology map.
The pattern worth noting is which hardware gets named. A certified Matter cluster is worthless until a controller exposes it, so feature support in practice is verified device by device — KLIPPBOK, Flood Gen4, WAGO 2757-1106. For anyone running Home Assistant as a Matter controller in a building rather than a house, blind travel-time calibration and lock keypad policy are exactly the settings that previously forced a vendor app onto the site.