Home Assistant energy dashboard from scratch

Building a Home Assistant energy dashboard from scratch is a rewarding way to see where your power goes while keeping the data on your own network. Home Assistant ships with a built-in Energy dashboard (Settings > Dashboards > Energy), so most of the work is choosing hardware that reports accurate kWh and feeding those sensors in. This guide focuses on Home Assistant and notes where Hubitat or HomeKit fit in.

How the built-in Energy dashboard works

Home Assistant’s Energy dashboard is not a generic chart. It expects sensors that report cumulative energy (kWh) with the correct device_class: energy and state_class: total_increasing. You configure grid consumption, return to grid (solar export), solar production, individual devices, and gas/water in the Energy settings page. Once configured, it builds daily, monthly, and yearly views automatically, plus a “monitor individual devices” section.

The practical takeaway: pick hardware that exposes a proper energy (kWh) sensor, not just instantaneous watts. Most devices below do both.

Start with the right hardware

Whole-home: P1 smart meter reader

If your utility meter has a P1 port (common in the Netherlands, Belgium, and parts of the EU), the HomeWizard P1 Meter clips onto that port and reads your entire home’s import/export over a fully local API. If you have rooftop solar, our guide to energy monitoring for solar homes covers tracking production and export too. The official HomeWizard integration creates power and energy sensors that drop straight into the Energy dashboard’s grid section. No panel work required.

Per-outlet: smart plugs with metering

For tracking a single appliance, a metering smart plug is the easiest entry point:

• HomeWizard Energy Socket — Wi-Fi plug with a local API and per-outlet energy reporting.
• Shelly Plus Plug S — Wi-Fi plug that reports power and energy. By default it runs Shelly’s own (Allterco) firmware and is read locally via the Shelly integration or MQTT. (Flashing Tasmota is an optional advanced step, not the default.)
• Sonoff S31 — Wi-Fi plug commonly flashed to ESPHome or Tasmota for fully local metering; the stock firmware is eWeLink/cloud-oriented.

Per-circuit / whole-panel

To measure circuits in your breaker panel you need a panel meter with current transformer (CT) clamps. The Shelly Pro 3EM is a DIN-rail three-phase meter that ships with CT clamps and reports per-phase voltage, current, and energy locally - see how to build a power monitoring dashboard with Shelly for a full walkthrough, and how to add energy monitoring to an old panel if your breaker box predates smart metering. Note: the inline Shelly Plus 2PM has built-in metering for its two switched channels (no external clamps) and is meant for controlling/monitoring specific loads, not clamping around panel busbars.

Hubitat and HomeKit notes

Hubitat (e.g. the Hubitat Elevation C8) runs automations locally and supports Z-Wave and Zigbee metering devices. Zooz makes metering Z-Wave hardware — for example the Zooz ZEN30 Double Switch for control, or Zooz’s energy-monitoring smart plugs for plug-in loads. You can bridge Hubitat into Home Assistant via the community Hubitat integration to surface those sensors on the Energy dashboard. (Note: the Zooz ZEN72 is a Z-Wave dimmer switch, not a plug or energy meter — don’t rely on it for consumption data.)

HomeKit has a basic energy view but no dashboard comparable to Home Assistant’s. HomePods act as Thread border routers and speakers — they cannot run Home Assistant. Run Home Assistant on a Home Assistant Green, a Raspberry Pi, or a mini PC, and add a Home Assistant Connect ZBT-1 (now discontinued and replaced by the Connect ZBT-2, which is the one to buy new) for Zigbee/Thread devices.

Build the dashboard

Once your energy sensors exist, configure the Energy dashboard in Settings > Dashboards > Energy. Assign grid sensors, any solar production, and individual devices. For custom views beyond the built-in dashboard, add Energy cards, the Statistics graph card, or the History/Statistics cards to any normal dashboard.

Real-world tradeoffs

• Cost — A P1 reader or a couple of metering plugs is cheap; a panel meter with CTs plus (ideally) an electrician costs more.
• Granularity vs. effort — Whole-home (P1) is easiest but won’t tell you which circuit is expensive. Per-circuit metering is more work and may require opening your panel.
• Maintenance — Keep Home Assistant and Z-Wave JS / Zigbee firmware updated, and back up your config regularly.

Quick verdict

Start with a P1 reader for instant whole-home visibility, or a metering smart plug for a single appliance, then add a panel meter with CT clamps when you want circuit-level detail. Because the Energy dashboard is built in, the hard part is just picking hardware that reports real kWh locally.