Home Assistant Dashboard Templates You Can Copy

Every dashboard template I found online was a screenshot with a few lines of YAML under it. Copying one of those means retyping the rest and guessing at the parts that were cropped out. So here are two complete dashboards, as files, that you paste and that work.

One uses nothing but built-in cards and runs on any Home Assistant with no additions at all. The other uses four custom cards and a theme, and is the one that looks like something. Both come from a machine set up for this, so the entities are demo sensors rather than my house.

Wiring a YAML dashboard in

This is the step that is usually missing, and without it a template file does nothing. A YAML dashboard sits alongside the clicked one rather than replacing it, so nothing you already built is at risk.

# configuration.yaml
lovelace:
  mode: storage          # das geklickte Standard-Dashboard bleibt bestehen
  dashboards:
    demo-bordmittel:
      mode: yaml
      filename: dashboards/demo.yaml
      title: Demo
      icon: mdi:view-dashboard-outline
      show_in_sidebar: true

Put the file at config/dashboards/demo.yaml, restart, and it appears in the sidebar as its own entry. If you edit the file afterwards, Home Assistant picks the change up on a reload of the dashboard — no restart needed for content changes.

Template one: built-in cards only

Twenty-three cards, three sections, no custom components. Gauges for the live values, tiles for everything that is a number with a name, and a history graph at the bottom. This is the honest baseline: it is what a fresh installation can do before you add anything.

title: Demo
views:
  - title: Übersicht
    path: uebersicht
    type: sections
    max_columns: 3
    sections:
      - type: grid
        column_span: 2
        cards:
          - type: heading
            heading: Energie
            heading_style: title
            icon: mdi:solar-power-variant
          - type: gauge
            entity: sensor.pv_leistung      # ← ersetzen
            name: Erzeugung
            unit: W
            min: 0
            max: 8000
            needle: true
            severity: { green: 3000, yellow: 800, red: 0 }
          - type: gauge
            entity: sensor.hausverbrauch    # ← ersetzen
            name: Verbrauch
            unit: W
            min: 0
            max: 3000
            needle: true
      - type: grid
        cards:
          - type: heading
            heading: Temperaturen
            icon: mdi:thermometer
          - type: tile
            entity: sensor.wohnbereich_temperatur   # ← ersetzen
            name: Wohnbereich

That is the shape of it — the full file continues with the same pattern for the remaining sections. Every entity: line marked above is one you have to replace, and that is the whole work of adopting it.

Template one, dark mode. No custom components involved.

Template two: with custom cards

The second dashboard uses Mushroom for the tiles and controls, mini-graph-card for the trends, button-card for the battery ring and card-mod to reach the parts a theme cannot style. Those four come from HACS, and the theme is a file in config/themes/. If you are picking what else to install while you are in there, I keep a running list of the ones I actually use.

It looks considerably better and it costs four dependencies that can each break on their own schedule. I run it because I wanted to see how far the built-in cards fall short, and the answer is: less far than I expected. If you want one dashboard that keeps working while you are not looking at it, take the first one.

Template two: four custom cards and a theme of its own.

Replacing the entities is the actual work

This is where pasted dashboards fail. A template references entity ids that exist on the machine it came from, and Home Assistant renders a card for an entity that does not exist as an empty box with the id printed in it. Nothing errors, it just looks wrong.

The fastest way through it is Developer Tools, the States tab, and a filter on the domain you need — sensor.power, climate., whatever applies. Replace them in the file rather than in the interface, because then you have a record of what the dashboard expects.

One thing worth knowing before you photograph anything: an energy total built on a Riemann sum starts at zero and builds over the day. If you paste this in the morning, the energy section is empty and that is the sensor, not the template.

What I would change first

The gauge maxima. Mine are set for an 8 kW array and a house that draws up to 3 kW, and a gauge with the wrong ceiling gives you no information at all — the needle sits in the same place all day. Set them from your own extremes before anything else.

If you want to know why the fourth section exists at all, I wrote up building the same dashboard in five steps, which shows what grouping does. For the styling side there is the theme comparison, and the card directory lists what else is available.