Hello HA fanatics,
Right, let’s get started with my fourth custom HACS integration, which is already in the default list for you to use: WashWise
What is it?
WashWise looks at your weather forecast and tells you whether it’s a good time to wash something outdoors, or whether you should hold off.
It answers the little questions you keep asking yourself:
- Should I wash the car today, or is it going to rain tomorrow anyway?
- Is this weekend clear enough to clean the patio?
- Do I really need to run the garden sprinklers tonight, or is rain coming?
- Will my solar panels get a free rinse this week?
You point WashWise at any Home Assistant weather sources, pick what you’re washing (car, motorcycle, bicycle, boat, and more), and it gives you a clear yes/no verdict, a 0–100% confidence score, a plain-language reason, and a day-by-day breakdown.
The highlights
Works with any weather source
WashWise reads any Home Assistant weather source you already have, no per-provider setup, no extra accounts. If it shows up as a weather source in Home Assistant, WashWise can use it.
Backup weather sources
List more than one weather source in order of preference. If your favourite one goes quiet, WashWise automatically falls back to the next one.
A clear score, not just yes/no
Alongside the yes/no verdict, WashWise gives you a 0–100 confidence score. It’s built from how much rain is forecast, whether it’ll freeze, and how bad the overall conditions look. A “yes” at 95 is a very different weekend from a “yes” at 55.
Eleven ready-to-go categories
Car, motorcycle, bicycle, boat, camper, house windows, laundry, solar panels, patio/deck, garden irrigation, and a fully custom option. Each one comes with sensible defaults: a bicycle tolerates a bit more damp than a freshly waxed car, for example. Additionally, you can fine-tune any of them!
Solar panels think backwards (on purpose)
For solar panels, rain is a good thing… it rinses them clean :D. So WashWise flips the logic: a rainy forecast means “no need to clean, nature’s got it.”
Garden irrigation mode
Also flipped: here a rainy forecast means “skip watering tonight.” You can even connect an optional rain gauge so that measured rainfall counts too, and hand WashWise an optional switch so it turns your sprinklers off when rain is on the way and back on when things dry out.
Updates itself automatically
No timers to set up. The moment your weather source reports new data, WashWise recalculates the verdict.
Snooze
Heading out or already washed the car? Snooze the verdict for a set number of hours. A countdown shows how long is left.
Wash log
Tap a button to log a wash. WashWise then tracks how many days it’s been since the last one, and how many washes you’ve done in the past 30 days.
The card
WashWise comes with its own custom dashboard card, and it registers itself automatically after installation, with no extra copying of files.
The card shows the verdict, the confidence score, a forecast strip for the days ahead, and an optional diagnostics panel. There’s a visual editor so you don’t need to write any YAML configuration by hand: you can set a friendly title, pick light/dark/auto theme, choose accent colours, and toggle a compact mode.
Automation examples on the repo
GitHub + full docs: GitHub - italo-lombardi/Home-Assistant-WashWise: Home Assistant integration: weather-forecast-based wash advisor for cars, motorcycles, windows, solar panels, and more. · GitHub
If you find this useful, I’ve built a few other custom integrations too:
- Entity Distance: Tracks distance between 2–5 people, devices, or zones, including direction, speed, ETA, and proximity.
- Entity Availability: Know when your devices go offline, and how reliable they really are.
- Entity State Tracker: Tracks how long devices spend in each state over time, with per-state breakdowns, scoring, and a custom card.
- Fuel Compare: Tracks live fuel prices from 36 providers across 30 countries.
- Entity Guard: Enforces device states using simple rules. Replaces hand-written auto-off, auto-lock, and kill-switch automations.
- DashSnap: Home Assistant App to record or screenshot any web page via headless Chromium: HA dashboards, Grafana, public pages.
- DashSnap Integration: Trigger DashSnap from Home Assistant automations. See App above.
Happy to answer questions here. Bug reports and feature requests are welcome on GitHub Issues too.
Happy to answer questions here. Bug reports and feature requests are welcome on GitHub Issues too.