Power Consumption by Room: Grouping Philips Hue with Powercalc in Energy Dashboard

I wanted each Philips Hue bulb in the house to appear in the Home Assistant Energy Dashboard - but grouped by room, not as 32 individual entries that would overwhelm the display. The solution: install Powercalc, add missing sensors, group everything by room, and integrate it into the dashboard.

What is Powercalc - and why do I need it?

Powercalc is a custom integration for Home Assistant that estimates power consumption for devices that don’t report their own usage - typically bulbs, but also fans, media players, and other “dumb” consumers. Instead of a smart plug on every single bulb, Powercalc creates virtual power and energy sensors calculated based on profiles.

For lights, this works differently depending on the calculation strategy:

• Library Profiles (LUT): Powercalc comes with a built-in library of over 190 device profiles based on real measurements. For Hue bulbs, this means brightness, color, and color temperature automatically flow into power consumption estimates - without any configuration once the manufacturer/model is recognized.
• Fixed Power: A constant watt value for devices where consumption barely changes or that have no library profile.
• Linear Model: Power consumption is scaled linearly between a minimum and maximum value, e.g. depending on brightness.
• Templates: Custom formulas/templates for cases that can’t be mapped with standard strategies.

Additionally, there are group sensors that combine multiple devices, an entire room, or the whole house into a single total value - exactly the tool I need for room-by-room grouping. Powercalc also automatically creates appropriate energy sensors (there’s no consumption without energy integration over time) that can be used directly in the Energy Dashboard.

My use case: 32 Hue bulbs, 6 rooms, one Energy Dashboard that shouldn’t drown in 32 individual bars.

Installation via HACS

Powercalc is part of the standard HACS repository, so it doesn’t need to be added via a custom repository URL:

1. Open HACS → Explore & Download Repositories
2. Search for Powercalc and download it
3. Restart Home Assistant
4. Under Settings → Devices & Services → Create Integration search for Powercalc and run the Global Configuration through the setup wizard

Powercalc supports both GUI configuration and YAML - for room groups and the many individual entities in this setup, YAML was the more practical approach.

Taking Inventory

Before actually writing the config, I had to do an inventory. Querying the device registry for the Hue integration revealed:

• 32 physical Hue bulbs distributed across 6 rooms (kitchen, living room, bedroom, makerspace, balcony, garden)
• Only 9-11 of them already had a Powercalc sensor - automatically created by autodiscovery based on the profile library
• Hue also creates virtual “room”/“zone” light entities (e.g. light.wohnzimmer, light.kuche) that mirror the state of the entire room - these had to be explicitly excluded, otherwise you’d count the consumption twice
• One bulb (a Hue Econic outdoor wall light) almost slipped through unnoticed because its zone alias was named almost identically

Adding Missing Sensors

For the ~22 bulbs without a sensor, it was enough to declare them under Powercalc’s sensors: list - just the entity_id, Powercalc retrieves the power profile itself based on manufacturer/model (the library profile strategy applies automatically):

powercalc:
  sensors:
    - entity_id: light.kuche_haupt_1
    - entity_id: light.kuche_haupt_2
    # ...

Five bulbs had no profile in the library (2× Hue Bloom bedside lamps, one dimmable innr bulb, one LEDVANCE pathway light, and the Hue Econic wall lamp). For these, the Fixed Power strategy was used with an estimated value from the datasheets:

  - entity_id: light.nachtisch_links
    fixed:
      power: 5

Creating Room Groups

The Home Assistant Energy Dashboard only has a flat list under “Individual Devices” - entities can’t be nested under a room there. The solution: create a Powercalc group sensor per room that sums up the consumption of all members into a <room>_lights_power / _energy pair, with correct device_class/state_class so the dashboard can actually create statistics from it.

  - create_group: "Kitchen Lights"
    entities:
      - entity_id: light.kuche_haupt_1
      - entity_id: light.kuche_haupt_2
      # ...

Repeating this for all 6 rooms results in six group sensors - each with its own power and energy sensor.

Pitfall Note: The path there wasn’t entirely straightforward. First attempt used a type: group syntax from a paraphrased documentation summary - that doesn’t actually exist in the real Powercalc schema. The error message wasn’t visible because logging was set to default: critical and the integration just showed “Not loaded” with no explanation. After some research in the Powercalc source code (sensor_config.py), I found the correct syntax. Then a second problem: rooms mixing old autodiscovery sensors with newly declared ones threw “already configured” errors - the cause was a dedup logic that didn’t work reliably and created a second, differently named duplicate sensor for the same bulb on every restart.

The lesson: When a custom integration in Home Assistant silently fails to load, check the logger level first before assuming the setup is broken - default: critical can swallow exactly the Voluptuous schema error message that would explain everything.

Cleanup

Rather than fighting the dedup timing, the cleaner solution was to remove the now-redundant old autodiscovery sensor entries for the 11 already covered bulbs (after verifying that none of their entity IDs were referenced in dashboards or automations). Ten of eleven deleted without issue; the last one briefly blocked after too many successive deletions - but on the next restart, no conflict appeared and the bedroom group now correctly uses the existing sensor.

Adding to Energy Dashboard

Powercalc automatically creates an appropriate energy sensor for each group sensor - the actual foundation for the dashboard. The final step:

1. Settings → Dashboards → Energy
2. Under “Electricity consumption - Add individual devices” click Add Device
3. For each room, select the appropriate <room>_lights_energy sensor

New energy sensors can take up to an hour to appear with data in the dashboard - that’s normal and not an error.

Results

Six new entries under “Settings → Dashboards → Energy → Individual Devices” - one bar per room, cleanly grouped:

Room	Tracked Bulbs
Kitchen	7
Living Room	11
Bedroom	6
Makerspace	5
Balcony	2
Garden	2

Conclusion

Powercalc turns 32 bulbs that would otherwise never see a power meter into six clean room bars in the Energy Dashboard - without any additional hardware. The actual configuration (declaring sensors, building groups, adding to dashboard) is straightforward. The only real hurdle was logging that was too strict and swallowed the critical error - a good reminder to check the logger level first when silent load failures occur.