WLED RGBW LEDs

Helheim · September 27, 2023, 2:32pm

The color wheel in HA seems to work properly. If I have the setting in WLED set to None and use white in the wheel it’s RGB white but if I have it set to Accurate then it’s just white channel white.

Rofo · September 27, 2023, 2:54pm

I have some RGB-CCT WLED strips coming this week so I’ll have a play around and see if i get the same behaviour and report back.

stevemann · September 27, 2023, 3:01pm

You mean this? I have to click on the entity then select the colorwheel here:

Any tips of how I can show the colorwheel without drilling down to it?

Helheim · September 27, 2023, 3:07pm

Ya that’s the same way I have it. I don’t really use that much though as I have it mostly set via automations and it was working until I switched to Accurate mode. These are my house outline lights so I have them come on a night in a dim white light then go off 30min before sunrise but I switched to Accurate mode so they’ll work better with xLights for my Christmas show and then they didn’t come on that night and my wife wasn’t happy, lol.

Helheim · September 27, 2023, 4:53pm

I guess I need to update more often. I updated to the latest version of HA and now it works fine.

Rofo · September 27, 2023, 6:26pm

You’re welcome

Sawtaytoes · May 28, 2025, 7:16am

I posted here about my experience with the current version of HA:

Seems super buggy :(. How did you guys get it working? Was it broken like mine is? Is this a recent bug?

NerdyGriffin · January 2, 2026, 7:01pm

After fighting with my Home Assistant WLED automations for a few weeks, I think I finally got it to work right.

TLDR: If you change any of the settings in LED Preferences in WLED, then you often must go to the WLED integration page in Home Assistant and click “Reconfigure” before HA can control it correctly.

It seems that many of these issues happen because changing the Auto-calculate W channel from RGB mode in WLED changes what type of light Home Assistant thinks the device is (RGB vs RGBW, etc.).

When Auto-calculate White in WLED is set to Accurate or Brighter, Home Assistant will see it as an RGB light, and WLED will handle calculating the white channel.
When Auto-calculate White in WLED is set to None, Home Assistant will see it as an RGBW light (or RGBWW if that is the type you have).
When Auto-calculate White in WLED is set to Dual, the behavior in Home Assistant seems to be inconsistent. This mode requires more testing.

Another note: The White Balance correction setting in WLED sort-of does “work” with Home Assistant (in the sense that HA will still control the light), but the problem is that it makes the color temperature slider behave very differently than how HA uses color temperature.

When White Balance correction is DISABLED, both WLED and HA use color temperature in the same way: When you set a color temp, (e.g. 3000K), the RGB values for that light are set to the combination that will produce a resulting off-white color that matches approximately the given color temperature.
- For example, color_temp: 2000 results in ff890e which equals 255,137,14
- While color_temp: 6500 results in fffefa which equals 255,254,250
- You can see the resulting color combo by checking the hex values in WLED, or by watching the color wheel and/or sliders change automatically in WLED when you change the color temperature in HA
When White Balance correction is ENABLED, WLED will use the color temperature value to apply a “color filter” on top of whatever RGB values are set. So, if you set the light to RGB 255,255,255 then adjust the color temp, you will see the RGB values (displayed in WLED) remain the same but the visible appearance of the light gets skewed warmer or cooler. However, Home Assistant still thinks that sending a color temperature value to the device will result in the behavior I described earlier, where the device auto-calculates a set of RGB values to approximate that temperature.
- This means that if the light in HA was previously OFF, or set to any non-white color, then using light.turn_on with a color temp will result in the WLED staying black or not displaying the expected color. You can work around this by having Home Assistant first send a light.turn_on with RGB white (255,255,255) to the WLED device, then send the color temp in a separate light.turn_on command. But in my testing, this only works sometimes, and the resulting color is often still influenced by whatever color it had previously (despite explicitly reverting it to 255,255,255,255 before the color temp command)
  - In my opinion, the easier solution is to just make sure White Balance correction is disabled in the WLED Web UI, since that makes the WLED color temperature behave the same way as the other built-in light integrations.
- Second, the WLED docs explain that the White Balance correction filter “is applied to the RGB color only, after the auto white channel calculation”. So, if 1) White Balance correction is enabled and 2) you have Auto-calculate White set to Accurate and 3) you set the RGB value to 255,255,255, then you will get the following result:
  - WLED will output full brightness 255 to the white channel only, with the RGB channels essentially off, and you will not be able to see the effects of the color temp slider on the resulting light (because the White Balance correction is applying the color temp filter to only the RGB color channels, which happen to be off at that moment)

Again, if you want to try any of this out, remember to Reconfigure the WLED device in Home Assistant any time you make a change to the LED Preferences in WLED

TLDR: If you change any of the settings in LED Preferences in WLED, then you often must go to the WLED integration page in Home Assistant and click “Reconfigure” before HA can control it correctly.