I get the skepticism. If you run one load of laundry a week, automating it feels like overkill — and until robots learn to load the machine for me, I'm still the one carrying the basket. So what's the point?
The point was never the load. It's the when.
Run the dishwasher, washer, and dryer at 5-8pm because that's when the house is home and the mess is fresh, and you're paying Peak rate for every one of those kilowatt-hours. Let Home Assistant hold the same three loads until the cheap window instead, and nothing about your day changes — you still load the machine, still fold the washing — except the electricity underneath it costs a fraction as much.
The actual math
Using typical energy draw for a dishwasher (~1.2kWh), washer (~1.0kWh), and dryer (~2.5kWh) — about 4.7kWh for all three — and our real Alinta tariff rates:
Do that once a week and it's about $6.50 a month, $78 a year. Run all three a few times a week — which is closer to reality for a family of six — and it's closer to $234 a year. Not life-changing money. But it's not nothing either, and it costs precisely zero extra effort once it's set up.
Why this is a Home Assistant job, not an appliance job
The appliances themselves are perfectly capable of running on a timer. What they can't do is know the tariff schedule, know when solar is genuinely surplus versus just present, or hold off a start time until the actual cheapest window rather than a fixed clock guess. That's the same orchestration story as everything else on this site: three separate machines, each good at their own job, and one layer above them that actually knows what time it is and what power costs right now.
Small thing. Adds up anyway.