Keep an eye on your energy consumption data within the Alexa app
As you’ve probably guessed from the name, Amazon’s Alexa Energy Dashboard provides you with an overview of the energy consumption from your compatible Alexa smart home devices.
Working with smart lights, plugs, switches, water heaters, thermostats, TVs and Echo smart speakers, this feature allows you to quickly dive into the Alexa app and get an idea of your energy usage.
A quick look there shows that brands such as Philips Hue, Lifx, Sengled, Gosund, TP-Link Kasa, Lutron, Honeywell, HiSense and Leviton are all on board the energy monitoring initiative.
It’s now been a while since the service went live, with more and more companies developing ways to inform Alexa about energy consumption – or allow the smart assistant to estimate it.
However, the Alexa Energy Dashboard is still only available in the US.
If that includes you, let’s look at what you can do with the dashboard.
How to use the Alexa Energy Dashboard
Within the Alexa app, simply tap the Energy Dashboard icon to bring up the graphs and details.
For a more accurate overview, you can also enter more detailed device details if prompted within the app.
You can sort by type, energy, time, week and month, too, giving you the ability to spot trends, receive insights and see suggestions from within the tabs.
As well as the new Dashboard, so users can get an overview of their energy usage, Amazon also launched Alexa Hunches earlier this year, in order to get smart home devices shut down when they aren’t being used.
Availability: More devices and countries coming soon?
The Energy Dashboard should see a lot more Alexa-compatible devices showing up as time goes on.
When Amazon first announced the initiative back in September 2020, it opened up APIs for devs to use and proactively report a smart home device’s energy consumption to Alexa, or, as we’ve said, let Alexa estimate the energy used by those devices.
Since it hit the Alexa app in early 2021, we’ve not heard much regarding new devices – or, indeed, the service being rolled out to Canada, Europe or the UK.
With constant Alexa updates filtering through, however, we would wager it’s only a matter of time before the Alexa Energy Dashboard is available to more users. We’ll update this guide when it does.
