How Ikea’s smart home app is about to save you money
The mobile app from Ikea lets you control your smart home, and will now find ways to save money on your energy bills
It seems like everyone is getting in on the smart home market these days. You can nab products from specialist brands or even from furniture companies these days. Most notable of the bunch is Ikea, with a range of smart home devices available. And now the Swedish furniture giant wants to help save you money. This time, it’s not a flat-pack solution, but rather a new feature for its smartphone app.
Dubbed Energy Insights, this new feature isn’t just about throwing numbers at you. Rather, it’s about tracking how much juice your appliances are sucking up and, crucially, when it’s costing you an arm and a leg to run them. By showing you real-time data on energy usage and electricity prices, Ikea is pretty much nudging you to switch off that old tumble dryer when the entire neighbourhood is cooking dinner.
The app allows you to compare your energy consumption with that of similar households. Yes, now you can finally confirm whether you’re the only one in your postcode who’s obsessed with air frying everything. Of course, all this data is anonymised. So you won’t be able to see what Sheila in number 4 is doing.
However, don’t throw your wallet on the latest Ikea products just yet. This new app feature is currently only available in Sweden, through the Ikea Home smart app. But Ikea does plan to use what it learns from this test to potentially roll it out globally. So, we might all soon get a chance to play the game of ‘who can use less electricity’.
Ikea also announced the Inspelning smart plug, coming this October. This isn’t just any plug – it (also) measures the energy use of whatever you plug into it. Even your night lamp isn’t safe from scrutiny. Details on the pricing are still under wraps, but Ikea generally leans towards the more wallet-friendly side, so there’s hope this won’t be a bank-breaker.
Connor Jewiss
