IKEA is piloting a new smart home app feature designed to help people control their energy consumption and save money on their bills. Announced this week, the Energy Insights feature provides real-time data on how much energy your devices are using, along with the price of electricity at the current hour.
As discovered by The Verge, the idea is that you can use it to identify the most energy-consuming appliances in your home, then make informed decisions about how much you're using them and the best times to use them to maintain your energy. accounts below.
It will also allow you to compare your energy use to that of similar homes, to give you a better idea of what “normal” energy consumption is like, so you can adjust your habits if necessary (and feel smug/embarrassed, as appropriate).
Unfortunately (for our non-Swedish readers), the Energy Insights pilot project is only running on the Swedish IKEA Home smart app for now. However, the flat-pack giant plans to use what it learns to improve the service and expand it to include other markets. So if it's successful, we'll hopefully see a release to other territories relatively soon.
The announcement is also accompanied by the presentation of a new smart plug: the Inspelning, which will go on sale worldwide in October. It connects through the Dirigera hub and in addition to having control and automation capabilities, it can measure the energy consumption of any device.
This feature is still pretty rare: in our roundup of the best smart plugs, only the Eve smart plug currently has energy monitoring capabilities and it's not included with IKEA's other smart plugs (the Tradfri and the Tretakt). There is no pricing information available yet, but with a little luck it will prove to be an affordable solution.
Smarter energy use
Speaking about the Energy Insights feature, IKEA Sweden Product Owner Mikael Szalay explains: “We want to enable our customers to connect their energy data with their daily lives, so they can understand and manage their energy use more intelligently. “is about giving everyone the tools to reduce their energy bills and improve their ability to adopt smarter energy habits.”
Improvements are promised throughout the year, including personalized energy-saving tips and recommendations for IKEA products and services to help you achieve them.
Apparently, this service won't require any smart home products, just logging into the app from an IKEA Family account. This makes us wonder if this is more of a cleverly disguised marketing tool than a useful service, but that remains to be seen.
