Connect Hive Heating to Home Assistant: UK Setup Guide (2026)

If you have Hive and you're reading this, you've probably hit the limits of the Hive app. The schedules are fine. The geolocation is okay. But the moment you want your heating to behave based on anything more interesting than "it's Tuesday at 7am", you run out of road. Home Assistant is where that road carries on.

This guide walks through what Hive plus Home Assistant actually gives you, how to set it up in the UK, three automations worth trying on day one, and — honestly — what can go wrong.

What Hive on its own can't do

Hive is a closed ecosystem. It talks to Hive things, and that's mostly it. Home Assistant is the opposite: it's a neutral hub that speaks to almost everything, and once Hive is inside it, your heating becomes just another set of controls you can wire into the rest of your home.

A few concrete examples of what opens up:

Heating that reacts to other brands. Your Ring doorbell sees the last person leave. A Hue motion sensor confirms the hallway is empty. Home Assistant drops the Hive thermostat to 16°C without you touching anything. Hive's own geofencing can't see any of that — it only knows about the phones you've told it about.

Schedules that depend on context, not just the clock. Warm the house earlier if the forecast says it's below freezing. Skip the morning heat-up if your work calendar shows you're away. Delay the evening boost if nobody is home yet. None of this is possible in the Hive app; all of it is a few lines of automation in Home Assistant.

Room-by-room precision. If you have Hive radiator valves, you can finally treat them as individuals. Turn the towel rail on for 20 minutes before the weekday alarm and never at the weekend. Kill the spare bedroom valve unless the guest calendar says someone's staying. This is what you thought you were buying when you fitted the valves.

One dashboard for everything. Heating, lights, locks, energy, cameras — one screen, one app, on your phone or a wall tablet. No more hunting for the Hive app behind the Sonos app behind the Tado app.

An honest note on the Hive integration

Before you start, one thing worth understanding. The Hive integration ships inside Home Assistant itself — it's been part of the core project since release 0.59, back in 2017, and you don't need to install anything extra to use it. No HACS, no add-ons, no community repository. You add it the same way you'd add a Hue bridge.

That's the good news. The less good news: although the integration is in Home Assistant core, it isn't maintained by British Gas. Hive (and their parent, Centrica) has never released a public developer API or officially supported Home Assistant. The integration is written and looked after by two community contributors, @Rendili and @KJonline, whose code happens to live inside the HA core tree. That's the actual situation, and it matters because when British Gas changes something on their side — a new login flow, a tweaked API, a rotated token format — the integration can break until the maintainers ship a fix. Usually that's hours, occasionally longer. It's not fragile, but it isn't bulletproof either.

In practice, it works well. Thousands of UK households run Hive through Home Assistant every day. Thermostats, zones, hot water, valves, lights, plugs, motion sensors, contact sensors, glass-break and smoke detectors — all show up and respond quickly.

If the occasional "wait a day for a fix" scenario is a dealbreaker, Home Assistant probably isn't the right fit for your heating. If it's an acceptable trade for everything in the section above, read on.

Setting it up

You'll need Home Assistant running first. If you haven't got that far, the short version is: a Raspberry Pi 5 with an SSD is the house pick (or a Pi 4 if you already own one), and Home Assistant OS is the install flavour you want. Once you can log in to Home Assistant in a browser, you're ready.

Add the integration. Go to Settings → Devices & services, click Add Integration in the bottom right, and search for Hive. You'll find it in the list — it's part of core Home Assistant, no HACS required.

Enable two-factor authentication on your Hive account first. This is easy to miss: the Home Assistant Hive integration requires 2FA on the Hive side. If you haven't turned it on, do it in the Hive app now (Account settings → Security), before you try to add the integration.

Log in with the Hive account owner's credentials. The integration uses the same email address and password you use on the Hive website, and it will prompt for the 2FA code during setup. Important: the credentials must be for the Hive account owner. Shared accounts and secondary users will not work — this is a limitation on Hive's side, not a Home Assistant choice. If you log in with the wrong account you'll get a cryptic authentication error.

Wait for discovery. Once you've authenticated, Home Assistant queries Hive and pulls down everything on your account. Heating zones, hot water, any TRVs, any smart lights, active plugs, motion, contact, glass-break and smoke sensors, plus the hub itself. On a typical setup this takes under a minute. You don't have to tell it what you own — it figures it out.

Verify. Go to Settings → Devices & services, open the Hive integration, and you should see every Hive device listed, each with its current state. Click through to the thermostat and you'll see the current temperature, the target, the mode, and controls to change them. If that all looks right, you're done. Hive is now part of Home Assistant.

Three automations worth trying first

Don't try to rebuild your entire heating programme on day one. Pick a few small wins and let the rest come later.

Drop the heating when the last person leaves. Home Assistant can track the phones of everyone in the household and know when nobody is home. Wire that into a simple rule: when the house goes to "not home", set every Hive zone to 16°C. When somebody comes back, return to the normal schedule. This single automation is the one most people notice on the next gas bill.

Warm the bathroom before the weekday alarm. On Android, the Home Assistant Companion app exposes your next phone alarm as a sensor automatically, so you can have the bathroom warm fifteen minutes before it goes off and drop it back at 8am. Weekends skip themselves because there's no alarm. iOS doesn't expose system alarms to apps in the same way, so on an iPhone the cleanest alternative is to schedule the heat-up directly in Home Assistant (a simple weekday schedule) rather than trying to read the phone. Either way, it's a small thing that feels like magic on a January morning.

Notify you if a room goes cold overnight. Create a rule that watches every Hive TRV between 11pm and 7am, and sends a push notification if any of them reports below 12°C. That usually means a window has been left open, a valve has stuck, or the boiler has tripped. You find out at 2am instead of at 7am when the shower runs cold.

None of these require code you write yourself. They're all standard automation patterns in Home Assistant's visual editor.

What can break, and why it matters

The Hive integration has two failure modes worth knowing about.

The first is authentication. Every so often, the login token the integration uses expires or is rejected, and it needs a fresh sign-in. Most of the time it renews itself silently. Occasionally it doesn't, and your heating controls sit there showing stale data. You notice because a schedule doesn't fire, which is the worst possible way to notice.

The second is API changes. British Gas updates the Hive app, the underlying endpoints shift, and the community integration needs a patch. The maintainer is usually quick, but "usually" isn't "always", and if you're on holiday when it happens you may come home to a house that's been heating itself on a fallback schedule for three days.

Neither of these is a reason not to do it. They're reasons to have someone — or something — watching. Running Home Assistant at all is an ongoing maintenance job: monthly core releases with patch updates in between, backups in case something goes wrong, and a pair of eyes on the logs so silent failures don't become cold mornings. Most people do this themselves, and enjoy it. Some don't have the time or the inclination.

That's the gap habbb fills. We run Home Assistant on your behalf — pre-configured hardware shipped to your door, remote updates, daily backups, and monitoring that flags it when your Hive integration stops talking so we can fix it before you notice. The boiler-service analogy is the honest one: we keep what you have working. If you'd like the full picture of what that looks like, the managed Home Assistant guide covers it.

The bottom line

Hive through Home Assistant is genuinely one of the best upgrades you can make to a UK smart home, and it costs nothing in hardware beyond what you already own. You get context-aware heating, proper room-by-room control, and one dashboard for your whole house. The setup is an afternoon's work.

The catch is the ongoing care. The integration is community-maintained, Home Assistant updates land every couple of weeks, and small things go wrong now and then. If you enjoy tinkering, that's part of the fun. If you don't, habbb manages Home Assistant for UK homeowners so you can have the outcome without the homework.

Common questions

Is there an official Hive integration for Home Assistant? It's a bit more nuanced than yes/no. The Hive integration lives inside Home Assistant core, which means it ships with every install and you don't need HACS. But it's written and maintained by community contributors — not by British Gas or Hive themselves. Hive has never published a public developer API and doesn't officially support Home Assistant.

Will installing Home Assistant break my Hive app? No. The Hive app continues to work exactly as before. Home Assistant talks to Hive's servers the same way the app does, so both can run side by side.

Do I need to open any ports on my router? No. Home Assistant talks outbound to Hive's cloud. For remote access to Home Assistant itself you'd use Nabu Casa, a Cloudflare tunnel, or a managed service — none of which need inbound ports.

What happens if the Hive integration breaks? Your Hive app and Hive's own schedules keep working — the underlying Hive system is untouched. What stops is Home Assistant's ability to read and control Hive until the integration is updated or reconnected.

Does this work with Hive radiator valves and hot water too? Yes. The integration discovers thermostats (including multi-zone), hot water, TRVs, Hive smart lights, Active Plugs, window and door sensors, motion sensors, and the Hub 360 features (glass break, dog bark, smoke and CO detection). Whatever you see in the Hive app, you should see in Home Assistant.

Can habbb set this up for me? Yes. Hive is one of the integrations we configure as part of onboarding for customers who already have it, and we monitor it afterwards so you're not the one who notices when it stops.