Everything to get started right.

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.

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.

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.

They feed two different things. The energy sensor (kWh, cumulative) feeds history, curves and totals, the exact same data the Energy dashboard itself reads. The power sensor (W, live) feeds the real-time chips only; without it, a chip has nothing to show and stays on a dash, even though the curves keep working. The battery has its own separate, optional power field in the Energy dashboard, easy to miss since it's optional and fairly recent in Home Assistant. If your battery chip shows a percentage instead of a live wattage, that's exactly this: a state-of-charge sensor is configured but no power sensor, so the chip falls back to the percentage. On a multi-tariff (peak/off-peak) meter, the power sensor is a single field for the whole connection, entirely separate from the list of per-tariff energy meters: there's nothing to duplicate, one sensor covers every tariff.

This is a sign issue, and it's set entirely in Home Assistant's own Energy dashboard, not in Helios. Open Settings, Dashboards, Energy, and on that source's power sensor field, switch between Standard and Inverted until the direction is right, or, if your sensor only ever measures one direction (import-only, for instance), switch to Two sensors and give it both. Helios's own battery-sign option in the card editor is display-only: it changes which symbol (+ or −) is drawn next to the number, never the underlying calculation, so it can't fix a genuinely inverted sensor.

Both are right, they just answer different questions. A small summary panel describes the whole selected period (its number is an average over that period), while the timeline and the live chips show the value at one exact instant, either now or wherever you're pointing on the timeline. So "how did the battery do over the whole period" and "where is the battery right now" are genuinely different numbers, and they're not meant to match except by coincidence.

That's expected, these cards don't work the same way. Helios reads exclusively from Home Assistant's Energy dashboard and shows its values as they are, never recomputed; your Energy configuration is the source of truth, not Helios. Cards like Power Flow Card Plus work differently: they're configured independently of the Energy dashboard, from power sensors, and can convert power and energy into one another depending on what you give them; that conversion stays an estimate, sensitive to how often the sensors update, not a direct reading. A small gap between the two cards usually isn't an error: it's the difference between a raw dashboard reading and a real-time reconstruction.

It names the selected period: today plus the next two days (that tab was called "Forecast" until 2026.9.4). It says nothing about the kind of number shown below it: the two rows under it always show actually-measured production, in every period, for consistency across the whole card, never a forecast total. The curve and its hover tooltip are the only place the forecast series itself shows up.

The solid amber line is your measured solar irradiance, in W/m² on a fixed scale. The dashed line is your production forecast, but drawn as a shape only, normalized to its own peak, so its height tells you the shape of the day, not an absolute value: hover it to read the real number.

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.

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.

Yes, already supported: set a different location for that specific card in the visual editor's "Home location" section (or home-latitude/home-longitude in YAML, set as a pair). Useful for monitoring an installation at a second property.

Each card remembers its own camera angle (bearing/pitch) in your browser, keyed by its coordinates rounded to about 111 meters when no explicit ID is set. Two cards that close together land on the same key and end up sharing an angle. Give one a distinct cache-id in its config to decouple them. That angle lives in your browser's local storage, so it's per-device too: the same card won't remember its angle across your phone and your desktop unless you set each up separately. The view lock itself, though, is a config setting shared by every viewer, not a per-browser state.

It's intentional, and it isn't even a special case in the code: the curve simply follows the sun's real azimuth for your latitude, which happens to run the other way below the equator (solar noon ends up north of the house, because that's genuinely where the sun is). It looks backwards at first if you're used to a dial built around the northern hemisphere, but it's the geometry that's actually correct everywhere on Earth.

For the angle: drag the preview in the visual editor to the angle you want, then turn on "Lock rotation" in the "UI and map" section. The angle is then saved into the card's config, so it's the same on every device. To get back to live after scrubbing the timeline: just get close to the "now" line, a light magnetism snaps you back automatically (with a small "Live" chip confirming it), or use the dedicated "Live" button that appears on the timeline any time you're away from the present moment, for a one-tap return.

They appear when Helios Forecast provides the forecast: one tile per panel line you configured there, at the line's own position (or on your roof, on the side it faces, when the line has no coordinates), turned to its azimuth and raised to its tilt. Each brightens as the sun comes square to it, and its dotted line points at the sun while it is up. Without the integration nothing changes: the single ray from the sun to your production stays.

The forecast comes from the separate Helios Forecast integration, which computes it entirely on your own instance. It also keeps an hourly past archive (recomputed against real historical weather and corrected against your actual production), which backs a genuine "what was predicted" curve you can compare directly to what actually happened, not just a forward-looking forecast. Head over to the Helios Forecast page to see how it works in detail.

In Helios Forecast, the separate integration, not in the Helios card itself. The two projects share a family name but are independent: either can be installed without the other.

No, and it never will: Helios is a Lovelace card, code that only runs in a browser tab that's actually open. At 3 AM, with nobody looking at a dashboard, nothing of the card's is running, so it has no way to act on a schedule or create Home Assistant entities, that's the job of a backend integration. Helios Forecast, on the other hand, runs continuously server-side inside Home Assistant and can expose whatever prediction an automation needs. The split is deliberate: the card displays, Forecast predicts, and you keep control of what actually acts.

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.

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.