Current energy demand for appliances in smart homes is nowadays becoming a severe challenge, due to economic and environmental reasons; effective automated approaches must take into account basic information about users, such as the prediction of their course of actions. The present proposal consists in recognizing user daily life activities by simply relying on the analysis of environmental sensory data in order to minimize energy consumption by guaranteeing that peak demands do not exceed a given threshold. Our approach is based on information theory in order to convert raw data into high-level events, used to represent recursively structured activities. Experiments based on publicly available datasets and consumption models are provided to show the effectiveness of our proposal.