Area Charts, 3D Panels, and Visual Polish
Release Date: June 5, 2026
Type: Feature and bug fix release
What's New
Peak panel output setting
A new "Peak panel output (W)" setting in Settings lets you tell Solar Sentinel the rated wattage of your panels. Previously the color gradient maxed out at 150W regardless of panel capacity, which meant a 360W panel producing 200W looked the same deep orange as a panel at its actual limit. With this setting, the gradient scales to your hardware: full orange appears at 95% of the rated wattage, reflecting the real-world peak output you actually see rather than the theoretical STC rating. Default is 300W. Set to 0 to restore the old automatic scaling.
Area charts for Today
The production and grid import/export charts now render as smooth filled area charts when viewing Today, replacing the hourly bar charts. The curve rises from dawn, peaks at solar noon, and ends at the current hour rather than dropping to zero for hours that haven't happened yet. Week, month, and year views remain as bar charts since those show period totals where bars are the clearer choice.
3D panel cards
Panel cards now have a subtle raised look: a layered shadow lifts each card off the background, and colored panels have a top-to-bottom lighting gradient that gives them depth. Panel colors also fade smoothly when data updates instead of snapping instantly.
Live indicator pulse and refresh countdown
The Live button now glows with a soft pulsing green animation when Solar Sentinel is in live mode. A countdown timer showing seconds until the next data refresh appears next to it, so you know exactly when the panels will update. The countdown hides when you are viewing history.
What's Fixed
Hard refresh no longer needed after updating
After installing an update, some users on the Home Assistant companion app and certain browsers were seeing a blank or partially loaded screen unless they did a hard refresh. This was caused by a bug in the cache busting logic: the main JavaScript file was versioned correctly on each release, but the modules it loads internally were not, so browsers served them stale from cache. All modules are now covered, and future updates will load cleanly without any manual intervention.
No settings migration needed. Update via Settings > Add-ons > Solar Sentinel > Update and refresh the page.
See CHANGELOG.md for the full version history.