Get up and running, and unstuck.
Helios reads everything from your Home Assistant Energy dashboard. Set that up once and the card just works. Below: the setup, then the questions people ask most.
Set up your Energy dashboard first.
- 1
Open the Energy dashboard settings
In Home Assistant, go to Settings, Dashboards, Energy. This is the single place Helios reads from, so everything you set here flows straight into 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 live, to-the-second values, give each source its optional power (W) sensor too, not only the kWh one. Without it, the live chips fall back to the recorder and only refresh every few minutes.
- 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.
Full guide: Home Assistant Energy documentation.
Questions people ask most.
The card is empty or shows no data.
Helios reads everything from your Home Assistant Energy dashboard. Make sure it is configured (Settings, Dashboards, Energy) with at least a solar, grid or battery source. If the Energy dashboard is empty, there is nothing for the card to draw.
Live values show dashes or stay flat.
The energy (kWh) sensors drive the history and charts, but the instant live numbers 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 live chips update only every few minutes.
My house renders wrong, or only half of it.
The 2.5D scene uses your building's OpenStreetMap footprint. Check that your building exists on openstreetmap.org with a correct footprint; if it does not, add it there and wait for it 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 your Home Assistant home location (Settings, System, General). You can override it per card in the visual editor if you want to point it somewhere else.
Where does the weather come from? Is my data sent anywhere?
Irradiance and cloud cover come from keyless Open-Meteo, and the map and buildings from OpenStreetMap, served as vector tiles by OpenFreeMap. Everything else is your own Home Assistant data. There is 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 manually, instead of the Energy dashboard?
Not by design, and it's a choice I'm glad to stand behind. Helios reads 100% from your Home Assistant Energy dashboard, and it always will. That keeps the card genuinely simple to set up, even if you're just getting started; it copes with every kind of install without burying you in options; and it means the exact same figures show up everywhere, in the Energy view and in Helios alike. Plenty of improvements are on the way, but per-card entity wiring won't be one of them, and that's on purpose.
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. See the Helios Forecast page for how it works.
I found a bug, or I have an idea.
Open an issue on the GitHub repository. The issue forms guide you to the few details (your card config, a screenshot, the browser console) that make it fixable fast.
Still stuck? Open an issue on the Helios repository, or, for forecasts, on Helios Forecast.