# Day-to-Day Use

What to expect from Hungry Machines once it's running — your first week, adjusting comfort and savings, pausing, and the one-time warm-up.

Once Hungry Machines is installed and your appliances are registered, it mostly runs itself. This page covers what happens automatically, what you can adjust, and what your first week looks like.

## What runs on its own

Every day, without you doing anything:

1. **Throughout the day**, the app collects readings from your appliances so the optimizer can learn how your home behaves.
2. **Once a day**, it sends your local weather forecast.
3. **Overnight**, Hungry Machines builds a fresh 24-hour plan for each appliance — shifting energy use toward the cheapest hours while staying inside the comfort and charge limits you set. It can replace the rest of today's plan during the day too, when you change a setting or conditions shift, and the app picks the new plan up on its own.
4. **Every 30 minutes**, your Home Assistant applies the current step of that plan: setpoint, mode, and fan for HVAC; on or off for EV chargers, batteries, and water heaters.

You can watch all of this on the [dashboard](/home-assistant/dashboard/) — what's running now, what's coming next, and how much you're saving.

## Your first week

Hungry Machines learns *your* home, not a generic one, so its plans get better over the first days of running.

| When | What's happening |
|---|---|
| **Right after setup** | Each appliance gets its first plan from the first planning run after you add it: when you save a setting, or overnight at the latest. |
| **The first few days** | Plans arrive every day, but there is little to go on yet, so the savings estimate can sit at zero. This is normal. |
| **From then on** | Hungry Machines keeps learning from more weather and more of how your home responds. Savings tend to grow as the picture fills in. |

> **Note**
>
> Consistent readings speed this up. Long gaps — a thermostat offline, a network outage — slow the learning down, because there's less data to learn from. If you're a week in and an appliance still has no plan, check the health badges on your appliance cards and see [Troubleshooting](/troubleshooting/).

## The one-time warm-up (calibration)

On the first warm day after you add an HVAC, Hungry Machines runs a short, one-time **warm-up** for that unit: a controlled morning cooling pattern that lets it directly measure how your specific system responds. While it's running, the panel shows a banner — and a **Skip** button if you'd rather it didn't run that day.

About a week later there's a second warm-up day, and it's much quieter: your unit holds three temperatures in a row, all inside your comfort band, so the room never drifts. It measures how quickly your system closes a small gap — something the first warm-up can't see.

Both runs happen once per unit (unless you re-run the first one later, for example after servicing your HVAC). It's worth letting them finish: the measurements they gather make every schedule afterward more accurate.

## Adjusting comfort and savings

Open an HVAC's **Edit constraints** (from its dashboard card) to tune how it behaves:

- **Base temperature** — the temperature you'd like to sit at when you're home and comfortable.
- **Comfort band** — how far the room may drift from your base temperature. Until you set your own hourly bands, every home gets the same default, which depends only on your base temperature and mode. When cooling it runs from 2°F below base to 1°F above overnight, and from 5°F below to 6°F above between 08:00 and 21:59. Heating mirrors it: 1°F below to 2°F above overnight, 6°F below to 5°F above by day. The savings level setting no longer changes the band.
- **Mode** — cool, heat, auto, or off.
- **Away / home times** — when you typically leave and return. They are stored with your settings; they do not change the default band.
- **Hourly comfort bands** (advanced) — set your own high and low limit for each hour of the day. This is how you widen or narrow the default band, and the way to relax comfort while you're out.

A wider band gives the optimizer more room to work, so it generally saves more — the trade-off is larger temperature swings. If your schedule chart looks nearly flat, a narrow band (or a flat-rate electricity plan) is usually why; see [Troubleshooting](/troubleshooting/#schedule-looks-like-flat-setpoints).

For EV chargers, batteries, and water heaters, **Edit constraints** sets charge targets, minimums, deadlines, or tank temperature limits instead.

> **Tip**
>
> After you save a change, Hungry Machines re-plans right away — you don't have to wait for the next night to see the new schedule on the chart.

## Pausing

Two ways to step in:

- **Pause one appliance** — its per-card toggle takes just that device out of optimization and hands control back to you, without losing its settings.
- **Pause everything** — the master optimization switch stops Hungry Machines from applying any schedule at all.

While paused, schedules are still calculated in the background, so turning optimization back on takes effect at the next 30-minute boundary — no waiting for the next night.

## Comfort always wins

If your indoor temperature ever drifts outside your comfort band during a scheduled *off* period — an unusually hot afternoon, say — the app overrides the plan and runs your HVAC to bring you back into range. Savings never come at the cost of leaving you uncomfortable.

## Next steps

- [Choosing Your Electricity Pricing](/home-assistant/pricing/) — make sure the optimizer is saving against the rates you actually pay.
- [Troubleshooting](/troubleshooting/) — health badges, flat schedules, and sign-in problems.

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