Samsung SmartThings can now help you reduce your energy bills

SmartThings is the smart home platform owned by Samsung, capable of connecting to thousands of smart home services and tying them into virtual assistants like Bixby and Google Assistant. SmartThings has seen a few major updates over the past few months, and now Samsung has announced yet another feature aimed at reducing energy bills.

Samsung revealed SmartThings Energy in a press release today, a new service in the SmartThings app. The new feature “allows consumers to take control of their energy consumption with monitoring, target-setting, and notifications of their Samsung appliances and HVAC systems,” according to Samsung. You’ll be able to monitor the energy and water usage of various home appliances, set targets, and receive tips on how to reduce costs. The SmartThings app will also send notifications when a device is using too much energy at a given time, such as an HVAC system running when no one is home.

The main catch seems to be that each device has to report its own power usage, which requires additional hardware and software that many smart devices don’t have. You’ll only get an incomplete picture of your energy usage, even if you have some of the supported Samsung devices. It’s also not clear when third-party devices will be able to use this — for example, the ability to record power usage of non-compatible devices through TP-Link’s energy-monitoring smart plugs would be helpful.

You can try out SmartThings Energy today by opening the SmartThings app, tapping the ‘Life’ tab, pressing the plus button in the top-right corner, and selecting SmartThings Energy.

SmartThings (Free, Google Play) →

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