HA time one minute off (but fixed itself?)

Configuration
1

Just noting this in case anybody sees similar.

Yesterday the clock within HA was one minute ahead of the actual time. Therefore the logbook showed changes that just happened as “in one minute”. I spent ages Googling, restarting etc to no avail. Then the next morning the time is accurate again.

While it was wrong, this is what I was seeing from timedatectl on the HA box:

               Local time: Tue 2025-11-04 10:33:34 UTC
           Universal time: Tue 2025-11-04 10:33:34 UTC
                 RTC time: Tue 2025-11-04 21:32:34
                Time zone: Etc/UTC (UTC, +0000)
System clock synchronized: no
              NTP service: active
          RTC in local TZ: no

I’m running HAOS on a Proxmox VM with Pihole as my DHCP (and it assigns a fixed IP to HA). Now that it’s working again, this is what I get:

               Local time: Tue 2025-11-04 22:37:36 UTC
           Universal time: Tue 2025-11-04 22:37:36 UTC
                 RTC time: Tue 2025-11-04 22:37:36
                Time zone: Etc/UTC (UTC, +0000)
System clock synchronized: yes
              NTP service: active
          RTC in local TZ: no

Note that synchronized is now ‘yes’ and the RTC time has changed from what I assumed was local time (since I’m +1100) to UTC.

The only thing I can think of that may have fixed it is Pihole was giving me a log saying it did not have the CAP_SYS_TIME privilege and I fixed this (Pihole is on a different VM) - but after Pihole got successful NTP messages it was still a minute out on HA - no idea how often HA updates the time though.

2

I think HA updates its time 3-4 times a day.
Hypervisors like Proxmox is known to cause time drifts at times and the SNTP client is only securing precise timings right after an update.
Installing an NTP client or service will improve this.
The Chrony addon could be such one.

3

Ah thanks for the heads-up. I’ll give that a try. Not that it’s a real problem as I don’t have anything that relies on exact timing; it just looks annoying.