Smart homes not only make life easier, safer, more convenient and fun, they can also help you saving energy. Energy efficiency is one of the main perks of having a smart home. Being energy efficient can make a big impact to the cost of your electricity bill. 

At Yeti we’ve been testing different smart home appliances and brands that are currently compatible with our app and we want to share with you what we found.

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Smart Thermostats

If you start looking for smart thermostats you'll find that there are many possibilities. Nest, ecobee, Honeywell, Netatmo... Each of them have their own special functionalities and features but all will help you in your quest to save energy. 

According to nest, your thermostat controls up to the half of your energy bill so having a smart thermostat can save you money.

Programmable thermostats can only do a part of what smart ones do. Smart thermostats adapt to your daily lifestyle and know what temperature you like the most. They take care of turning off the thermostat when you are outside home and turning on again when you are near to come back. 

Here at Yeti, we’ve tested: Nest, Honeywell, ecobee and Netatmo. In the end, it depends on how you configure your thermostat but all of them helped us to save up to 10% of the electricity bill in a month. It would be hard to say which one it’s better. You need to check which one fits best your requirements.  

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If you have one of them and want to share your opinion, drop a comment in the section below!

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Lights

New LED technology allowed us to decrease the energy consumption. Currently, all smart home lights are based on this technology. Unless you have a big house with a lot of lights turned on all day long, you won’t see a big change in the energy bill like we saw with the thermostats. 

We’ve been testing all Yeti compatible lights like Philips Hue, LIFX, TpLink, Wemo and Yeelight. None of them reported a huge decreased in the energy consumption. 

However, smart lights can help us to be more efficient. We can control what lights are turned on by accident and turn them off using our voice assistants or a mobile app.

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Plugs

There are  appliances that keep  consuming energy even when we think that they are turned off, like TVs, computers, coffee machines...For this reason, using smart plugs can be a nice option to be sure we are not consuming more energy than we want to.

We have tested all Yeti compatible plugs (Wemo and TpLink). For us, smart plugs haven’t represented a big change in the energy bill, but that can be different if you have different consume habits. 

A nice feature of some  smart plugs is that they also allow us to measure the consumption of our appliances and that can be helpful.

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Yeti

Yeti can also help you to save energy with your smart home devices. If you still don’t know Yeti, you can get it for:

- Android

- iOS

Yeti allows you to control different smart home devices using a single interface. 

With Yeti premium, you have access to two features that will help you to save energy. Charms and Routines. Click here to read more about the premium version of Yeti

Yeti Premium features to help you save energy

Routines

Routines will allow you to turn on/off your devices at a selected time. You won’t leave your lights turned on by accident as you will be able to set up a timer. Also, you can turn on your lights based on sunrise.

Any of the devices can be configured to work with routines. However, lights and plugs make more sense as you can configure your thermostat to work in the eco mode before leaving. (See charms below)

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Charms

Charms are the other way how you can control your smart appliances to save energy. You can create charms to turn everything off before leaving home and also to set your thermostat in eco mode. So your home will enter into “power saving mode” when you are outside.

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This was a short guide about some tips to save energy using your smart home appliances. In case you have another tip drop a comment below!