# Your Dashboard, at a Glance

A tour of the Hungry Machines panel and cards inside Home Assistant — what every appliance card, chart, and control does.

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.

> **Tip**
>
> EV chargers, batteries, and water heaters get their own charts too — state-of-charge or tank temperature over the same 24-hour price backdrop, with a marker showing your target and deadline (for example, "80% by 07:00").

## The two dashboard cards

If you added the optional Lovelace cards ([Step 5 of Install](/home-assistant/#step-5-add-the-dashboard-cards-optional)), 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](/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](/home-assistant/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](/home-assistant/day-to-day/) — how to actually live with it: adjusting comfort, pausing, and what your first week looks like.
- [Choosing Your Electricity Pricing](/home-assistant/pricing/) — the single biggest lever on your savings.

Canonical page: https://docs.hungrymachines.io/home-assistant/dashboard/