By Jennifer Pattison Tuohy , a smart home reporter who’s been testing connected gadgets since 2013. Previously a contributor to Wirecutter, Wired, Dwell, and US News.
Energy management is a big benefit of the smart home, and more companies are starting to offer easier ways to monitor and control your home’s energy use through their app on your phone. The next level is offering intelligent ways to automate the process to save you money without you having to think about it. three phase power meter
Swedish furniture giant Ikea just took a small step toward providing that to users of its smart home platform, Home Smart. This week, it launched an Energy Insights feature to monitor your home’s energy use and announced its first energy-monitoring smart plug, the Inspelning, is coming in October.
Ikea says the Inspelning can monitor energy use for “any device.” It requires Ikea’s Dirigera smart hub and will be available globally, including the US, at launch. Ikea currently offers the Tradfri smart plug (global) and the Tretakt smart plug (EU / UK only), but neither has energy monitoring capabilities.
The new Energy Insights feature is limited to Sweden at launch, and Ikea is calling it a “pilot project,” insights from which will be used to explore how it can be scaled up and made available to other markets.
According to Ikea, Energy Insights will offer real-time data on energy consumption and electricity spot prices and compare your home’s usage to similar households. This way, you can adjust how and when you use more energy-intensive appliances to save money and reduce energy use.
The company says it plans to bring actionable tips on how to save energy to Energy Insights “in the future,” along with personalized recommendations on products and services available from Ikea that help reduce energy use.
“While the launch of Energy Insights is currently a pilot in Sweden, it represents a significant step in our strategic initiative to explore smart energy solutions,” said David Granath, Range Manager at Ikea of Sweden. “This is a small beginning of our journey to support our customers in saving energy and making informed decisions around their use of electricity.” He said they plan to improve the app further and expand their range of smart products that tackle energy costs and consumption in the smart home.
Energy Insights can work without energy-monitoring smart devices, said Granath. If you provide the app with details about your home, it will give you data and comparisons based on general energy usage information and electricity spot prices. You can also get more information if you give the app access to the energy data from your smart meter.
Earlier this year, Ikea added beta support for Matter, a new smart home standard designed to improve interoperability between connected devices. Last week, Matter added energy monitoring capabilities to its spec, meaning products with energy monitoring capabilities (like the Inspelning smart plug) could connect to other Matter ecosystems through Ikea’s Dirigera hub and share their data.
While none of the smart home platforms currently offer energy monitoring through Matter, many offer features that provide insights into energy use in your home. It's likely we’ll see a big uptick in these types of features, as well as more support for energy management across the smart home. Energy monitoring combined with automated, intelligent management of how a home consumes energy has huge potential to help us both reduce our energy use and save money.
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