v16.0.0 Removed Water Zone Climate Sensor – Can This Be Optional?

[HairyDuck]

Hello,

I upgraded to v16.0.0 (released 12 July 2025) of the HomeAssistant‑OctopusEnergy integration and noticed a breaking change:

“The water zone is no longer available as a climate sensor. You will need to update all references to point at the new water_heater sensor.”

I relied on the water‑zone climate entity because it functioned like a proper thermostat for my hot water heat‑pump setup — just like the heating zone. Having a climate entity made dashboard control really tidy and intuitive.

Since updating, I’ve lost that easy control and had to downgrade, because the new water_heater sensor doesn’t work well with any decent climate card. My Lovelace dashboard looks awful now I’ve lost that climate-based interface. (See the screenshot below of what it used to look like).

Could I ask:

• Why was the decision made to drop the water‑zone climate entity in favour of a dedicated water_heater sensor?
• Was it unavoidable due to Home Assistant or Octopus API changes?
• Would it be possible to bring back the water climate entity as an option for users who prefer that interface?
• Alternatively, is there a workaround or custom card that’d render the water_heater sensor in a usable way on dashboards?

Thanks in advance — it was a really useful piece of functionality and losing it has been a real pain.

Happy to help debug, test, or submit improvements if that would help.

Cheers!

This is what it used to look like and looked and worked well.

[BottlecapDave]

Hello and sorry for the late reply

Why was the decision made to drop the water‑zone climate entity in favour of a dedicated water_heater sensor?

water_heater best represented the data following HA guidelines, as this part of the heat pump is not to my knowledge a climate control which is typically a thermostat. This was something I was thinking about and also consulted with someone who helped contribute some of the codebase around the heat pump.

Was it unavoidable due to Home Assistant or Octopus API changes?

It was avoidable, but incorrect based on HA guidelines for the sensor. The longer this was unchanged, the more people would become accustom to the old sensor and then the harder to move.

Would it be possible to bring back the water climate entity as an option for users who prefer that interface?

There are no plans to bring this back otherwise the change wouldn't have been made. In hindesight, I should have deprecated the original sensor with the new one in place. This has been noted for future changes.

Alternatively, is there a workaround or custom card that’d render the water_heater sensor in a usable way on dashboards?

What part isn't working? I ensured that all functionality was available in some form as per the data provided via the API. I've tried the sensor using the inbuilt tile card and it looks the same as the climate sensor.

If you are referring to not being able to adjust the temperature, this occurs when the API doesn't provide a set temperature. This is the same functionality of the climate sensor, both now and when the water zone was represented in the climate entity. I could potentially revert to the current temperature (if available) if the set temperature isn't provided, but I'm not sure if this has unintended consequences when adjusted via the API (I'm not sure why it's not set/provided by OE).

[HairyDuck]

Thank you for taking the time to get back to me, much appreciated. I’ll be looking at spinning up a separate instance of HA to test it, as I don’t want to risk breaking all my dashboards again by updating and having everything go squirrely.