By Jeremy Koski · September 17, 2026
Solar panels generate electricity, but without monitoring you are flying blind. You cannot tell if your system is producing what it should, if a panel is underperforming, or if your battery is charging efficiently. Home Assistant gives you a single dashboard to track production, consumption, and storage in real time with historical data you can use. This guide covers connecting your inverter, building dashboards, and setting up alerts.
Most solar installers give you a proprietary app that shows basic production numbers. The app lives on someone else's server, the data may be delayed, and you have no control over how long it is stored. Home Assistant pulls data locally, logs it indefinitely, and lets you combine it with home energy consumption in one place. You can see how much your panels produced today, how much you used directly, and how much went to the grid or battery. If you want to understand your actual return on investment, you need this level of detail.
Home Assistant supports the major residential solar inverter brands through official integrations or community add-ons:
If your inverter is not listed, check the Home Assistant community forums. Many inverters expose standard Modbus TCP endpoints you can read with a generic Modbus sensor.
For Enphase and Fronius, Home Assistant discovers the device on your local network automatically. Go to Settings, then Devices and Services, and click discover. For SolarEdge, create an API key in your portal account first, then enter that key and site ID in Home Assistant. Once connected, Home Assistant creates sensor entities for production, voltage, current, and sometimes temperature. Sensors update every 30 seconds to 5 minutes depending on polling rate. For a walkthrough on getting Home Assistant running, see our guide on running Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi in 2026.
Home Assistant has a built-in Energy Dashboard that turns raw sensor data into charts. Go to Settings, then Energy. Under Solar Production, select your inverter's total production sensor. Under Electricity Grid, add grid import and export sensors if you have a smart meter or CT clamp. Under Battery Systems, add battery charge and discharge sensors if you have a battery. Save and wait a few minutes. The dashboard populates with daily, weekly, and monthly production charts.
Knowing production is only half the picture. You also need to know how much energy your home consumes and when. To track consumption, you need a whole-home energy meter like the Shelly EM or Emporia Vue. These devices measure total home power draw and feed it into Home Assistant.
When you track production and consumption, you can calculate self-consumption rate: the percentage of solar production you use directly rather than exporting to the grid. A high self-consumption rate means full value from your panels. A low rate means you are exporting power at a lower feed-in tariff. This data helps you decide whether to shift energy-intensive tasks to peak production hours.
If you have a Tesla Powerwall, Enphase IQ Battery, or DIY lithium bank, Home Assistant monitors state of charge, charge rate, discharge rate, and health. The Tesla Powerwall integration provides energy charged, energy discharged, and backup reserve percentage. For DIY banks, a Battery Management System exposing data via Modbus or CAN bus can be read into Home Assistant. Monitoring your battery tells you whether it holds charge as expected, how many cycles it has completed, and whether capacity is degrading over time.
Home Assistant can alert you when something is wrong. Practical automations to set up:
Each automation takes about 5 minutes to set up in the automation editor. Send alerts to your phone via the Home Assistant companion app.
Home Assistant stores sensor data in its database. For long-term analysis, use the Statistics component to create daily, weekly, or monthly aggregates. The Energy Dashboard provides daily and monthly views. For custom reports, export production data to CSV from the History page, or use the Grafana add-on for professional charts. This is useful for sharing production reports with your accountant, verifying warranty claims, or applying for solar incentives.
The software is free. Home Assistant is open source and all integrations are free. Hardware costs depend on what you have:
Total cost is under $200 if you already have a server running, or under $300 starting from scratch.
If you have solar panels and are not monitoring production locally, you are missing data that matters. Start with the inverter integration, set up the Energy Dashboard, and add consumption tracking once that is working. The alert automations are the highest-value feature because they catch problems early.
If you need help setting up solar monitoring or integrating your inverter, we provide solar and electrical services including inverter configuration and monitoring setup. You can also book an on-site visit and we will handle the full installation.
For more practical technology guides, check out our post on running Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi in 2026.