Making fridges with touchscreens finally makes sense with SmartThings.
What you need to know
- SmartThings Energy aims to deliver real-time monitoring of smart home appliance energy usage.
- This data can be used to set alerts and find out exactly how much energy each appliance setting uses.
- Only certain Samsung Home Appliances and HVAC systems are supported now, but support will be expanded to other SmartThings-compatible appliances in the future.
Samsung SmartThings is proving once again that it’s the most underrated way to control your smart home. After a big UI update last month, the SmartThings app is getting a new feature that’ll help you save energy and identify which of your appliances is a power vampire. SmartThings Energy, as it’s called, is designed to deliver actionable information that’s taken from any monitored Samsung appliances in your home.
While it’s currently limited to supported Samsung Home Appliances and Samsung HVAC products, SmartThings Energy will be expanded to Works with SmartThings (WWST) badged appliances in the future. The best smart speakers can be used to control your smart home via a Samsung SmartThings Hub and, with this new Energy feature, means you’ll be getting an impressively smart view of how your home’s power consumption meets your expectations.
SmartThings Energy works in three ways to help curb high energy usage. First up is the monitoring component, which displays real-time energy usage of your entire home, as well as a breakdown of individual devices that can report data back to the SmartThings hub. That real-time monitoring is what really sets this new SmartThings service apart from other similar products on the market and will give users a better idea of how much power certain settings actually use rather than just aggregating data over the period of hours or days.
Usage targets can be set to keep your power bill under a certain level to help with budgetary purposes or just to keep your usage at or below the average level. This data can then be utilized to compare consumption data to your personal goals in the app, as well as to historical patterns once you’ve used the service long enough. Alerts can be set up for appliances that exceed usage levels and can even be used to stop energy vampires in their tracks. Look for the feature to appear in the latest SmartThings app update.
For those of you who haven’t tried SmartThings before and have an old Galaxy phone lying around, you can also try to turn your old Samsung phone into a smart home sensor!
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