How I Set Up 7 Custom Home Assistant Dashboards
I run Home Assistant with over 50 connected devices, and the default dashboard is not enough. After a year of tweaking, I have seven custom dashboards that I actually use every day. Here is what I built, what works, and what I would do differently.
Why Custom Dashboards
The default Home Assistant dashboard auto-generates a card for every entity. With 50+ devices, that is a wall of cards with no organization. You end up scrolling past the garage door sensor to find the living room lights. Custom dashboards let you organize by use case instead of by device.
My seven dashboards cover: living room media, presence tracking, energy monitoring, garden irrigation, device status, a main overview, and an alerts dashboard. Each one is built with YAML rather than the visual editor because YAML gives you more control over layout and conditional display. Building these dashboards uses the same frontend skills I apply to web application development for clients, just pointed at my own smart home.
The Energy Dashboard: SMUD Data Integration
This is the dashboard I check most often. It pulls in data from Shelly smart plugs on major appliances and integrates SMUD utility data to show actual electricity costs. I can see which devices are using the most power and what it is costing me in real dollars.
The trick with SMUD data is getting it into Home Assistant in a useful format. I set up a sensor that tracks billing period usage and compares it against the tiered rate structure. Sacramento’s SMUD rates are relatively cheap, but they have tiers. Knowing where you sit in the tier structure helps you decide whether running the dryer at 2 PM or 10 PM actually matters for your bill.
One thing I learned: individual device monitoring with smart plugs is more useful than whole-home monitoring. Knowing your house used 45 kWh yesterday is less actionable than knowing the mini fridge in the garage used 3.2 kWh and the gaming PC used 2.8 kWh.
The Garden Dashboard: Rachio SVG Zone Maps
Sacramento gardening means managing irrigation carefully, especially in summer. I have a Rachio controller managing multiple zones, and the Home Assistant dashboard shows an SVG map of the yard with each zone highlighted. You can see which zones are active, scheduled, and how much water each has used.
The SVG zone map was the most satisfying thing to build. I traced the yard layout, assigned zones to polygons, and used template sensors to color them based on status. Green for recently watered, yellow for scheduled today, red for overdue. It is the kind of visualization that makes information immediately useful.
Presence Tracking and Automations
The presence dashboard uses Life360 and device trackers to show who is home. This feeds into automations: lights off when nobody is home, garage door alert if it is open and everyone has left, TV auto-off after 30 minutes with no presence detected.
The garage door automation alone has justified the entire setup. I have gotten alerts at least a dozen times when the garage was left open after someone left. Before Home Assistant, that door stayed open until someone came home and noticed.
Practical Tips From Running This Daily
Start with one dashboard and expand. I tried to build all seven at once and got overwhelmed. Pick the dashboard you will check most often, get it right, then move on.
YAML over visual editor. The visual editor is fine for simple layouts, but custom dashboards need conditional cards, template sensors, and layout control that only YAML provides. The learning curve is worth it.
Automations matter more than dashboards. A pretty dashboard you check once a day is less valuable than an automation that texts you when the garage door is open. Build the automations first, then build dashboards to monitor them. I took this same sensor infrastructure and used it to power a public-facing website. My post on how PaddleConditions pipes Home Assistant data to a live site covers that full pipeline.
Group by activity, not by device type. My media dashboard has the TV, Sonos, and streaming device controls together because I use them together. Grouping by device type (all lights, all sensors) makes for a neat list but a bad user experience.
If you want to see more about my setup, the Smart Home project page has the full technical breakdown including the device list and automation details. Home automation is one of the more rewarding areas of my day-to-day work as a Sacramento web developer, and it is a great example of how Sacramento’s growing tech scene extends beyond traditional software into IoT and connected devices.
