HA container does not respect NTP time change on host after container is started

Configuration
1

I run a container install of HA on an 8 GB Pi 5 (which also runs many other services, thus I don’t want HA to take over the OS).

I do not have a clock battery, and thus if the Pi has been off (e.g. power outage, thunderstorm, etc), it might take a few minutes to get the correct time. Often the Pi is up before the Internet is up.

Now the issue: if the HA container starts before the time sync happens, it seems scheduled events ignore that the time changed. This leads to lamps turning on at the wrong time, etc.

I use triggers like:

at: "22:00:00"
trigger: time

So I would expect them to respect the system clock if it changes. It also affect sunrise/sunset triggers, so it seems to be a global problem. If I run date inside the container, it is of course correct.

I think this is a regression, but I don’t know exactly when it started happening. Sometime earlier this year I believe is the first time I noticed it, but I didn’t figure out the cause until now.

It almost seems like HA reads the time once at startup and then just uses offsets from that. Is there a way to fix this? A known bug (I didn’t find anything in the bug tracker)?

3

A ds3231 is less then 2€ and solves all your problems.

4

I understand that getting some sort of real time clock for the rpi (either the official clock battery for Pi 5, or something connected to I2C) would solve this.

I still think HA should respect time changes though. The clock can drift over time and get corrected by NTP too for example.

5

Totally agree, but since it doesn’t, it does not hurt to look at an alternative solution