Everything you need to get started.
Helios reads everything from your Home Assistant Energy dashboard.
Just set up the Energy dashboard, and the card works, plain and simple.
Setup
Set up your Energy dashboard first.
- 1
Open the Energy dashboard settings
In Home Assistant, go to Settings, Dashboards, Energy. This is the only place Helios pulls its data from: everything you set here lands straight in the card.
- 2
Add your sources
Add your electricity grid (import, and export if you sell back), your solar production, and your battery. Each one points at the kWh energy sensor your integration already provides.
- 3
Add the optional power sensors
For to-the-second values, give each source its optional power (W) sensor too, not just the kWh one. Without it, the chips have no real-time value; the history stays available thanks to the kWh sensors.
- 4
Drop a Helios card on a dashboard
That's it. Add the card (type: custom:helios-card) and it picks everything up automatically. No per-card entity wiring.
The full guide: Home Assistant Energy documentation.
FAQ
The questions that come up most.
The card is empty or shows no data.
Helios reads everything from your Home Assistant Energy dashboard. Check that it's properly configured (Settings, Dashboards, Energy), with at least one solar, grid, or battery source. If the Energy dashboard is empty, the card has nothing to show.
Live values show dashes or stay frozen.
The energy (kWh) sensors feed the history and the charts, but the instant values need a power (W) sensor on each source. Add the optional power sensor to that source in your Home Assistant Energy dashboard. Without it, the chips have no real-time value (they stay on a dash); the history and the curves keep working thanks to the kWh sensors.
My house renders wrong, or only halfway.
The 2.5D scene relies on your building's OpenStreetMap footprint. Check that it exists on openstreetmap.org with a correct footprint; if it isn't there, add it and give it time to propagate. On very old devices, the browser's rendering limits can also clip the scene.
Nothing shows, or the scene is in the wrong place.
Helios centers on the home location set in Home Assistant (Settings, System, General). You can set a different location per card, in the visual editor, if you want a card to point somewhere else.
Where does the weather come from? Does my data go anywhere?
Irradiance and cloud cover come from Open-Meteo, with no API key, and the map and buildings from OpenStreetMap, served as vector tiles by OpenFreeMap. Everything else is your own Home Assistant data. There's no Helios server, no account, and no telemetry: your energy figures never leave your instance, and those services only ever receive an approximate location, never your exact coordinates.
Can I wire Helios to my entities by hand, instead of the Energy dashboard?
No, it's a deliberate stance, and a choice I fully stand behind. Helios reads 100% from your Home Assistant Energy dashboard, and it always will. That's what keeps the card genuinely simple to set up, even when you're just starting out, and what lets it adapt to every install without drowning you in options. And that single data source guarantees consistent figures, whether in the Energy dashboard or in Helios. I plan to add and change plenty more, but per-card entity wiring will never be part of it.
My battery or grid shows the wrong direction.
Some sensors report the opposite sign. For the battery, flip it in the Helios visual editor with the battery sign option (default, inverted, or hidden). For the grid, the direction comes from your Home Assistant Energy dashboard: set that source's power sensor to Standard or Inverted there.
How does the solar forecast work?
The forecast comes from the separate Helios Forecast integration, which computes it entirely on your own instance and feeds it into the Energy dashboard. Head over to the Helios Forecast page to see how it works.
I found a bug, or I have an idea.
Open an issue on the GitHub repository. The forms guide you to the few details (your card config, a screenshot, the browser console) that make it quick to fix.
Still stuck? Open an issue on the Helios repository, or, for forecasts, on Helios Forecast.