Save $1–$3 a Day on Energy Bills with Home Assistant (US)
Electricity prices in the US have drifted up for years, and in pockets of the country they've gone vertical. The EIA's 2026 Short-Term Energy Outlook puts the national average residential rate at 18¢ per kWh, but Californians on PG&E peak hours pay north of 45¢, ConEd customers in New York routinely see 30¢+ all-in, and Hawaii has been over 40¢ flat for a decade. The standard advice — unplug your phone chargers, switch to LEDs, run cold washes — is tired and won't move your bill in any meaningful way.
This guide is about something more specific. If you have Home Assistant running, or you're thinking about it, there are three things you can automate that together save a typical US household — especially one with solar, an EV, a heat pump or a home battery — somewhere between $1 and $3 a day. That's $365 to $1,100 a year, from arithmetic, not wishful thinking. No insulation work, no behavior change, no hair shirts. EIA data puts typical residential consumption at roughly 863 kWh per month — about $1,900 a year at the 2026 national average rate, and meaningfully more in California or the Northeast, or for homes with electric heat, EVs or pool pumps; a 15–30% reduction is genuinely within reach once the right automations are in place. The one-line version: this is how to use Home Assistant to save money on your energy bill in the US, with specific numbers and three practical automations.
How Home Assistant saves money on your energy bill
Home Assistant is a small computer that sits on your home network and talks to things. For energy, it reads your whole-home power draw (most reliably through an Emporia Vue 3 clamping onto your panel, or a Sense Home Energy Monitor that infers appliances from current waveforms), it pulls your utility's tariff schedule if you're on a time-of-use plan, it reads your solar inverter if you have one, and it reads your thermostat, EV charger, heat pump water heater and major appliances if they're smart.
Then it orchestrates. It tells the dishwasher to start at 1am because your TOU plan drops to super-off-peak then. It tells the heat pump water heater to top up at noon while the panels are producing. It pre-cools the house before the 4pm peak rate kicks in. It's not magic and it's not AI. It's a handful of rules running on a Raspberry Pi in a closet.
The reason it matters is that, on most modern US utility plans, electricity is no longer a single price. On PG&E's EV2-A plan, the same kWh costs about 25¢ at 1am and 60¢ at 5pm. On ConEd's voluntary TOU rate, peak summer afternoons hit roughly 3x the overnight rate. In deregulated Texas, free-nights plans from Reliant (Truly Free Nights, 8pm–6am), TXU (Free Nights & Solar Days, 8pm–4:59am) and Gexa charge nothing during their overnight window — every kWh you shift into it is genuinely free. The daytime rate is correspondingly higher (typically 18–22¢) to balance the books. If you can move your big loads from the expensive slot to the cheap one, the savings are immediate and measurable.
The three levers that actually move the needle
Most of what you'll read about saving energy with smart homes is noise. Turning off vampire loads saves pennies. Motion-activated lights are nice but LEDs already sip electricity. The real money is in three specific levers, and Home Assistant is good at all three.
Lever 1: Time-shift your big loads to cheap electricity
This is the biggest and easiest win, and it's available to almost anyone on a modern US utility plan.
Time-of-use rates have quietly become the default in much of the country. California's investor-owned utilities (PG&E, SCE, SDG&E) have moved most residential customers onto TOU by default, with peak windows typically 4pm–9pm. New York's ConEd offers voluntary TOU plans where peak summer rates run 30¢+ and overnight rates drop near 5¢. Massachusetts and the Northeast have similar structures through Eversource and National Grid. In deregulated states — Texas, Pennsylvania, Ohio, parts of Illinois — you can shop for free-nights, free-weekends or wholesale-indexed plans directly. On a flat rate, every kWh costs roughly the same. On a TOU plan, the gap between peak and super-off-peak is where the savings live.
Home Assistant lets you wait for the cheap periods automatically. You tell the automation "start the dishwasher in the next cheapest three-hour window before 6am" and it does exactly that. The same logic works for the washer, the dryer, the dehumidifier, pool pumps, and anything else that runs for a chunk of time and doesn't care when. Some appliances support delayed start from their own app; Home Assistant just picks a better time than you would, every night, without anyone thinking about it.
A household running a dishwasher, washer, and an occasional dryer or heat pump water heater cycle can typically shift 4 to 7 kWh a day this way. At the difference between 10¢ off-peak and 35–45¢ on a peak TOU window, that's somewhere in the region of $1.00 to $2.50 a day, every day, once the automations are set up. You're not using less electricity. You're paying less for the electricity you already use.
If you're already on a TOU plan or thinking about switching, there's a deeper guide on time-of-use electricity with Home Assistant that walks through the integration and the specific automations.
Lever 2: Actually use the solar electricity you generate
Roughly 5 million US homes now have rooftop solar, and the economics changed dramatically in April 2023 when California — by far the largest solar market — switched from NEM 2.0 to NEM 3.0 (the Net Billing Tariff). Export credits dropped roughly 75%. If that includes you, there's a trap in how the math works now, and Home Assistant is the tool that springs it.
Under NEM 3.0 in California, every kWh of solar you use inside the house is worth your retail import rate — often 40–60¢ on peak TOU hours. Every kWh you export back to the grid earns you an avoided-cost credit that averages 5–8¢, with brief spikes during summer evening peaks. That's a 4-to-7x penalty for exporting versus self-consuming. NEM 2.0 customers grandfathered onto the old rules still get retail-rate net metering for the rest of their 20-year term, where the ratio is closer to 1.5x. New York, Massachusetts and most other states sit somewhere in between, but the trend nationally is the same: self-consumed solar is worth more than exported solar, and the gap is widening.
The problem is that solar peaks in the middle of the day, when nobody's home and nothing's running. The default outcome is that most of your solar gets exported for pennies while you come home at 6pm and buy grid electricity at peak rates to cook dinner and run the AC. Home Assistant fixes this by watching your inverter in real time and diverting excess solar to things that can store or absorb it. A Rheem ProTerra or AO Smith Voltex heat pump water heater is the classic target — Home Assistant can flip it into "high demand" mode when the sun is on the roof and back to "energy saver" the rest of the day, effectively giving you a free tank of hot water on most clear days. A Span Panel can shed and add circuits dynamically. A Tesla Wall Connector, Wallbox Pulsar Plus or Emporia EV charger can ramp up and down to track solar production exactly. Heat pumps can pre-cool or pre-heat the house. Dishwashers and washers can be scheduled for solar peaks instead of overnight off-peak slots when production is strong.
A typical US 7 kW residential solar array produces somewhere in the range of 9,000 to 12,000 kWh a year depending on geography. Shifting even 2,000 kWh of that from export back to self-consumption is worth roughly $400 to $900 a year in avoided grid imports on a CA TOU plan, considerably less in cheaper-electricity states but still meaningful. For households with batteries the numbers get bigger again, because the battery becomes an extension of the self-consumption strategy across the evening peak.
Lever 3: Smart heating, cooling and hot water
For most US households, HVAC is the single biggest line item, and it's where the automation story is most nuanced.
Heat pumps — both ducted central systems and ductless mini-splits — are genuinely excellent when run well. NEEEP and DOE field data on cold-climate heat pumps consistently show seasonal COPs of 2.5 to 4.0 in moderate climates, meaning two to four times more heat per unit of electricity than resistance heat. But that efficiency only turns into savings if the electricity they drink is cheap and the setpoints are smart. Running a heat pump on a flat rate around 16¢ is fine. Running it with Home Assistant pre-conditioning the house ahead of TOU peak windows, ramping back during peak hours, and aligning hot water and defrost cycles with cheap or solar-rich periods is where the economics get genuinely interesting.
Pre-cooling is the killer automation in summer-peak climates. The house has thermal mass. If you cool it to 70°F at 3pm — when grid electricity is still mid-priced or solar is producing — and let it drift up to 76°F over the 4pm–9pm peak window, you've shifted several kWh out of the most expensive rate block of the day every single day. An Ecobee SmartThermostat, Honeywell T9 or T10, or a Nest Learning Thermostat all expose this kind of control to Home Assistant either natively or through their official integrations. For ductless setups, Mysa controls electric baseboards directly and Sensibo Sky or Sensibo Air bring most mini-splits with IR remotes into Home Assistant cleanly.
Hot water is the simpler version of the same idea. Heat pump water heaters from Rheem and AO Smith expose mode control over Wi-Fi; Home Assistant can flip them into high-demand mode during cheap windows and standby during peak. Households that move from default-mode operation to scheduled operation typically save $0.50 to $1.50 a day on water heating alone, depending on family size and tariff.
Zonal control matters less in the US than in the UK because most homes have central forced-air rather than radiators with TRVs, but it still exists in two important forms: smart vents (mixed results, often not worth it) and ductless mini-split zoning (excellent — heat or cool only the rooms in use, scheduled around occupancy). Households that move from a single central thermostat running 24/7 to occupancy-aware mini-split zoning typically see HVAC costs fall 15 to 25%, and that's before you start layering in tariff-aware scheduling on top.
What you actually need to get started
The ingredient list is shorter than you'd think. You need a working Home Assistant install — a Raspberry Pi 5 with an internal NVMe SSD is the reliable choice, booted from HA OS. You need a way to see your real-time power draw: an Emporia Vue 3 clamping onto your panel is the practical answer (the base unit starts at $99 and a multi-circuit bundle lands closer to $160), or a Sense Home Energy Monitor at $349 if you want appliance-level inference. Some utilities (PG&E via Share My Data, ConEd and others via Green Button Connect) expose interval data through APIs that Home Assistant can read directly — useful for billing-grade numbers, though typically a day delayed. You need whatever smart plugs, relays or native integrations let Home Assistant actually control the appliances you want to time-shift. And you need an hour or two of configuration per automation to get the logic right for your household.
None of this is hard in the sense that any single step is beyond a careful reader. It is hard in the sense that there are a lot of steps, they all have to work together, and they need ongoing maintenance. Integrations occasionally break when a vendor changes an API. Home Assistant releases a new version every month and sometimes an update needs attention. The remote access tunnel you set up needs to stay healthy. Backups need to actually run. This is the part of the story that the enthusiast forums quietly gloss over.
Who this works for, and who it doesn't
It's worth being honest about where the arithmetic in this guide applies and where it doesn't.
It works well for anyone on a TOU rate plan — which now includes most residential customers of PG&E, SCE, SDG&E and a growing share of ConEd, Eversource, National Grid and others. It works well for anyone on a deregulated free-nights or wholesale-indexed plan in Texas and similar markets. It works well for anyone with solar, especially in California under NEM 3.0 where self-consumption is now dramatically more valuable than export. It works well for anyone with a heat pump or heat pump water heater, where automation turns already-efficient hardware into actually-cheap operation. It works well for anyone with an EV, where a single automation shifting charging into the super-off-peak window pays for the entire Home Assistant setup several times over in a year.
It works less well — though still not nothing — for households on a flat rate with no solar, no EV, no heat pump and no time-flexible loads. You can still get some value from scheduling and from zone-aware HVAC, but the headline numbers in this guide assume you're using at least one of the tools above. If you're on a flat rate, the single biggest thing you can do is look at whether your utility's TOU option makes sense for your usage pattern; Home Assistant can help you work that out from your own consumption data before you switch.
It doesn't work for people who genuinely don't want to learn how to read a line chart or think about when their appliances run. That's fine — there's no shame in it — but those households are probably better served by a simpler product than Home Assistant, or by paying somebody else to run it for them.
The honest closing note
The arithmetic in this guide is real. $1 to $3 a day is achievable for a typical US household that puts the three levers in place, and it's considerably more than that for homes with solar, batteries or a heat pump on a steeply tiered TOU plan. None of it requires new insulation, new appliances or a change in how anyone in the household actually lives. It does require Home Assistant to be set up properly once and then kept running, and the second half of that sentence is where most self-built systems quietly fall over six months in.
If you want to do it yourself, the deeper guide on time-of-use electricity is the next place to go, with solar, EV and battery guides following. If you'd rather somebody else handled the setup, the updates, the backups and the occasional late-night fix when an integration breaks, you can see how habbb works — it's a managed Home Assistant service, designed for people who want the savings without the maintenance. Either way, the numbers are sitting there waiting to be collected.