Your Dashboard, at a Glance

Everything you manage day-to-day lives in the Hungry Machines panel in your Home Assistant sidebar. This page walks through what each part shows so you know where to look.

The dashboard

Open the panel and you land on the Dashboard — one card per appliance you’ve registered. Each card shows:

Today’s optimized schedule for that appliance, drawn as a chart (see below).
Today’s estimated savings compared with running the device on a plain, fixed schedule.
Edit constraints — opens the comfort or charge settings for that appliance.
A pause toggle — takes that one appliance out of optimization without deleting it. There’s also a master switch that pauses everything at once.

An Add appliance button lets you register more devices at any time.

Reading the HVAC chart

For an HVAC unit, the chart tells the whole story of the day in one picture:

The solid line is the indoor temperature Hungry Machines expects over the next 24 hours if the plan runs as scheduled.
The dashed lines are your comfort limits — the warmest and coolest you’ve said you’re willing to be at each time of day. The solid line always stays between them.
The bars behind them are your electricity prices hour by hour. Tall bars are expensive hours; short bars are cheap ones.
The savings figure above is how much cheaper this plan is than not optimizing.

Read together, the chart shows Hungry Machines pre-cooling (or pre-heating) during the cheap hours so your HVAC can coast through the expensive ones while keeping you inside your comfort limits.

The two dashboard cards

If you added the optional Lovelace cards (Step 5 of Install), they give you the same information without opening the panel:

Thermostat card (hm-thermostat-card) — current indoor and outdoor temperature, the same optimization chart as the panel, and a savings-level slider you can adjust in place.
Savings card (hm-savings-card) — today’s estimated savings, your home’s current power draw, and the next scheduled appliance run.

Both cards share the panel’s sign-in, so once you’re signed in they work everywhere on your dashboards.

Health badges

Each appliance card (and each dashboard card) shows a small health badge when its sensors look stale or disconnected. Hungry Machines can only optimize well on good data, so the badge is your early warning that a thermostat or sensor has dropped offline before it quietly costs you accuracy. For a full breakdown, the panel’s per-appliance diagnostics view shows exactly which readings look healthy and which don’t.

If a badge turns red, see Troubleshooting — the most common cause is a renamed or offline entity.

Settings

The Settings tab holds the account-wide options:

Weather entity — optionally pick the weather.* entity whose forecast is sent to the optimizer each day, so it plans against your local weather rather than generic data.
Pricing source — choose the electricity rate plan you’re billed on. This has a big effect on your savings, so it has its own page: Choosing Your Electricity Pricing.
Send feedback — a short form to send a comment, bug report, or idea to the team without leaving Home Assistant.
Account — sign out, or contact us if you’d like your account deleted.

Where settings live

A quick map of what’s set where:

Setting	Where to change it
Comfort (base temperature, savings level, mode, away/home times)	Each HVAC card → Edit constraints
Charge targets and deadlines (EV, battery) / tank limits (water heater)	Each appliance card → Edit constraints
Pause one appliance	That appliance’s pause toggle
Pause everything	The master optimization switch
Electricity pricing	Settings → Pricing source
Weather forecast source	Settings → Weather entity

Next steps

Day-to-Day Use — how to actually live with it: adjusting comfort, pausing, and what your first week looks like.
Choosing Your Electricity Pricing — the single biggest lever on your savings.