Introducing Hungry Machines
Your utility company can charge different rates at different times of day. Electricity at 2 PM on a hot Tuesday costs more than electricity at 2 AM. This is called time-of-use pricing, and most homeowners either don’t know about it or don’t have a practical way to respond to it.
Hungry Machines is built to solve that problem.
The Gap Between Pricing and Behavior
Time-of-use rates reward flexibility. If you can shift when your home consumes energy — running the AC harder before peak hours, charging your EV overnight, heating water when rates drop — you pay less without changing your comfort level.
The challenge is that doing this manually is tedious and error-prone. You’d need to check rate schedules, monitor weather forecasts, understand your home’s thermal behavior, and adjust multiple devices throughout the day. Every day. That’s not a realistic ask for most people.
What Hungry Machines Does
Hungry Machines connects to home automation software or device controller apps and generates optimized operating schedules for your HVAC system, EV charger, home battery, and water heater. Each night, the system analyzes three things:
- Your utility’s rate schedule — when electricity is cheap, moderate, or expensive.
- Tomorrow’s weather forecast — outdoor temperature, solar conditions, and how they’ll affect your home.
- Your home’s thermal model — how quickly your house heats up, cools down, and responds to HVAC operation, learned from your own sensor data over time.
From those inputs, it produces a 24-hour operating schedule. Your Home Assistant automation pulls this schedule and pushes it to your devices.
What We Mean by Control
Every recommendation Hungry Machines makes is visible and overridable. You set the comfort parameters: your preferred temperature range, when you’re home and away, and how aggressively you want to optimize for savings. The system works within those constraints.
Your data stays scoped to your account. The thermal model that learns your home’s behavior is trained only on your readings — we don’t pool data across users, because every home is different and pooled models are less accurate.
Getting Started
Hungry Machines works with any Home Assistant setup that has temperature sensors and HVAC controls. Follow the getting-started guide to install the integration and register an account — the system starts learning your home’s thermal behavior from day one. After about two weeks of sensor data, the optimizer has enough information to produce meaningful schedules.
There’s no lock-in. Your data is yours, the integration is open, and you can stop using it at any time.
If you have questions or want to learn more, visit our contact page or email us at info@hungrymachines.io. You can also experience a live example of these tools with our online game.