Updated for 2026. This guide walks through the Home Assistant Energy Dashboard setup step by step, references the official documentation, and covers solar, gas, and water tracking.

Home Assistant Energy Dashboard Setup Guide

The Home Assistant Energy Dashboard turns your utility bill from a black box into a real-time, granular view of where every watt goes. Built-in since version 2021.8, the dashboard tracks grid consumption, solar production, battery storage, gas, and water, with optional tariff calculations so you see the actual money cost. This guide is a straight setup walkthrough: hardware options, the official Home Assistant Energy Dashboard documentation reference, configuration steps, and how to extend it with custom Lovelace cards.

Quick Setup: Home Assistant Energy Dashboard in 5 Steps

1. Get a power monitoring source. Whole-home (Shelly EM, Shelly 3EM, Emporia Vue, IoTaWatt, Sense), per-device (smart plugs reporting kWh like Shelly Plug S, TP-Link Tapo P110, Aqara), or your utility’s smart meter via DSMR / P1 / similar.
2. Integrate the device into Home Assistant. Settings > Devices & Services > Add Integration. Most modern energy monitors have native integrations.
3. Open the Energy Dashboard config. Settings > Dashboards > Energy.
4. Add consumption sources. Under “Electricity Grid”, click “Add consumption” and select your kWh sensor (must be total_increasing). Repeat for “Return to grid” if you have solar, plus “Solar production” and “Home battery”.
5. Add tariffs (optional but recommended). Enter your per-kWh price under “Use an entity tracking the total costs” or “Use a static price”. The dashboard then shows cost in your currency, not just kWh.

Wait up to an hour for the long-term statistics graphs to populate. Real-time cards work immediately.

Home Assistant Energy Dashboard Official Docs and Resources

The authoritative reference for the Energy Dashboard lives at home-assistant.io/docs/energy/. Bookmark it. The official docs are the source of truth for:

• Required sensor properties (state_class: total_increasing, unit_of_measurement: kWh, device_class: energy)
• Supported device types and integrations
• Tariff and cost tracking configuration
• Solar and battery setup
• Gas, water, and individual device monitoring
• Troubleshooting why sensors don’t appear in the dashboard picker

If your sensor doesn’t show up when you try to add it, the most common cause is wrong attributes. The docs page on “Adding sensors to the Energy Dashboard” covers the exact requirements.

Choosing Energy Monitoring Hardware

Three categories of hardware feed the Energy Dashboard. Pick based on how granular you need to go.

Whole-Home Energy Monitors

These clamp around your main electrical feed and report total household consumption, sometimes per-circuit:

• Shelly Pro 3EM / Shelly EM: cheap, MQTT or local API, native HA integration
• Emporia Vue Gen 2 / Gen 3: per-circuit monitoring, integrates via local poll add-on or community integration
• IoTaWatt: 14 channels, fully local, has native HA integration
• Sense: cloud-based, machine learning device detection, has HA integration via cloud API

Per-Device Smart Plugs

Drop these in front of individual appliances to see exact draw:

• Shelly Plug S / Plus Plug S
• TP-Link Tapo P110 / P115
• Aqara smart plugs
• Athom Plugs (ESPHome)

For HA-first setups, anything running ESPHome or with a native local-API integration is preferred over cloud-dependent options.

Utility Meter Direct

If your electricity meter has a P1 port (common in the Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden), DSMR (Netherlands), or smart-meter API, you can read it directly:

• Dutch / Belgian P1 ports: P1 Monitor or DSMR Reader integrations
• UK SMETS2 meters: Hildebrand Glow / glowmarkt integration
• German SML meters: Tasmota IR reader

This is the most accurate option since it uses the meter the utility actually bills from.

Step-by-Step Configuration

Step 1: Verify your sensor

Before opening the Energy Dashboard config, confirm your sensor is properly exposed. Go to Developer Tools > States, find your energy sensor, and check its attributes. You need:

state_class: total_increasing
unit_of_measurement: kWh
device_class: energy

If you’re missing state_class or it says measurement instead of total_increasing, the sensor won’t appear in the Energy Dashboard picker. Some integrations need a customization in configuration.yaml:

homeassistant:
  customize:
    sensor.your_energy_meter:
      state_class: total_increasing
      device_class: energy
      unit_of_measurement: kWh

Step 2: Configure Electricity Grid

Go to Settings > Dashboards > Energy. Under Electricity Grid:

• Click Add consumption: pick your “energy from grid” sensor
• Click Add return (if you have solar that exports): pick your “energy to grid” sensor
• For cost: select “Use an entity tracking the total costs” if you have a sensor that already calculates it, or “Use a static price” for a flat rate

Step 3: Solar (Optional)

Under Solar Panels, click Add solar production and select your inverter’s energy production sensor. Same total_increasing requirement.

Step 4: Home Battery (Optional)

Under Home Battery Storage, configure energy going in and out of your battery system. Most inverters with battery support expose both as separate sensors.

Step 5: Gas and Water

Same pattern under Gas Consumption and Water Consumption. Units should be m³ or kWh (gas) and L or gal (water).

Step 6: Individual Devices

At the bottom, click Add device to track specific appliances. These show in the “Monitor individual devices” section of the dashboard with their own bars showing usage breakdown.

Customizing With Lovelace Cards

The built-in Energy Dashboard is solid but limited to its preset views. For real customization, build Lovelace cards using the energy data. Two community cards worth knowing:

• Power Flow Card Plus (HACS): animated real-time flow diagram of grid, solar, battery, and home
• Energy Period Selector + ApexCharts: highly configurable historical charts with custom date ranges

Install via HACS, then drop the YAML into a dashboard:

type: custom:power-flow-card-plus
entities:
  grid:
    entity: sensor.grid_power
  solar:
    entity: sensor.solar_power
  battery:
    entity: sensor.battery_power
    state_of_charge: sensor.battery_soc
  home:
    entity: sensor.home_power

Common Setup Problems

• Sensor doesn’t appear in picker: wrong state_class or missing device_class: energy. Fix via customize.yaml or restart HA after integration changes.
• Negative values or sudden jumps: sensor reset to zero (common with new integrations). The Energy Dashboard handles this if state_class: total_increasing is set correctly. Otherwise use a Utility Meter helper.
• Graphs show nothing for hours: long-term statistics compile hourly. Wait at least an hour, then check Developer Tools > Statistics for the sensor.
• Cost shows wrong currency: check Settings > System > General > Currency.
• Solar export goes negative: swap “consumption” and “return” sensors. Some inverters report both as a single bidirectional value, which needs splitting via templates.

Conclusion

Once configured, the Home Assistant Energy Dashboard pays for itself in weeks by exposing where electricity actually goes. Phantom loads, oversized HVAC cycles, and forgotten appliances become obvious. Combined with peak/off-peak tariffs and automations that shift loads, the savings compound. The setup takes 20 minutes if your sensors are already integrated. The hard part is getting good monitoring hardware in place.