If you meter three phases and want the house total in Home Assistant, the obvious move is to add the three sensors together with a template. It works, right up until something restarts.
Then the total jumps: three cumulative counters, each restarting at its own moment, summed by a helper that sees whatever arrives first. The energy is real, the sum is not, and afterwards you are in the statistics table repairing hours by hand.
The way out is not a better template. It is not having to write one.
What arrives in Home Assistant
The hub keeps its own total for the grid input, and it is that total — not a downstream sum — that Home Assistant receives:
| Hub level | grid power, energy in, energy out, cost, export value, plus today's figures |
| Per point | power, current, energy in, energy out, cost — for every point, including each phase when the input is split |
So — when the input is metered as one point per phase — the phases are there if you want them, and the total is there without assembling it. On a three-phase bench the two agree to the thousandth: an energy in of 3 418.048 Wh across L1 3 177.631, L2 165.815 and L3 74.602; a grid power of 309.85 W across 295.82, 9.69 and 4.33.
The part that matters is where that sum happens. It is computed on the hub from its own books and published as a single cumulative counter. Home Assistant sees one ordinary energy sensor that only counts up — not three sensors and an expression that has to guess what to do when one of them disappears for a minute.
That is the difference, and it is worth being precise about its size: what disappears is the sum-related spike — the one that comes from three counters restarting at their own moments and a helper adding up whatever arrived. What a restart of Home Assistant itself does to any single counter is a separate matter, and it is the subject of its own article.
What the Energy dashboard wizard does
When the integration offers to set up your Energy dashboard, it wires:
- grid consumption → the hub's own total energy in;
- return to grid → the hub's energy out;
- cost and compensation → the hub's cost and export value.
One sensor for the grid, not three. Whether your input is one grouped point or three phase points makes no difference here — the total is the total.
Under individual devices the wizard adds your load points — the circuits you actually want to compare. Supply points are left out, and so are generation and storage ones, which is what you want: three phase points listed as devices would together equal the whole grid, send your untracked figure to zero and put the mains in a list meant for appliances.
⚠️ On an older integration they were included, so if your device list already has "Input L1/L2/L3" in it from an earlier setup, remove those entries in the Energy dashboard's settings. Nothing was miscounted; it was noise, and it does not come back.
If your input is one grouped point
Entities in Home Assistant are per point, not per phase. So a grouped three-phase input arrives as one set of entities — the sum of the three phases, already — and there are no per-phase entities for it. The per-phase readings exist on the hub and are shown in the panel; they are not something an automation can subscribe to.
And one consequence of that worth knowing before you go looking for it in Home Assistant: a grouped point's total is the net across the phases. Export on one phase is offset by import on the others inside the same period, so a single-phase inverter can leave the hub's energy out reading almost nothing while the panels are plainly working. That is not the integration hiding it — it is what a netted input measures, and it is the subject of what a three-phase house sends back.
If you want the phases individually in Home Assistant, that is what a split input is for. Which of the two to choose is a decision about metering rather than about Home Assistant, and it is worked through in Your three-phase supply is being measured on one phase.
⚠️ The risky direction is back. Going from per-phase points to one grouped point deletes the L2 and L3 points and erases their own history — their totals move into the input, so the site's totals survive, but the per-phase records do not. Download what you want to keep before switching that way.
What this doesn't do
- It does not make the phases balance. The hub reports what each phase did; an unbalanced house stays unbalanced, and seeing it is the point.
- It does not switch anything — not between phases, not anything else.
- It does not replace your meter. Your network operator measures at its own meter with its own clock, and two honest measurements of the same house will differ.
- It does not give per-phase entities for a grouped input. One point, one set of entities, by design.
Where to read more
- Your three-phase supply is being measured on one phase — making the input three-phase, and choosing one point or three.
- What a three-phase house sends back — why export on one phase hides behind the draw on the others when the input is one point.
- Energy that survives a Home Assistant restart — the restart problem in general, and what the hub's own record does about it.