Now Available: Enable Your Customers to Track and Manage their Devices’ Energy Usage with the Alexa Energy Dashboard

In September, we announced the new Alexa energy dashboard, accessed through the Alexa app, that gives customers a single place to track and manage the estimated energy consumed by their compatible Alexa-connected smart home devices. Today, we are excited to announce you can now integrate your compatible lights, switches, plugs, TVs, water heaters, and thermostat devices with the new energy dashboard, with support for more devices available in the coming months. You can now use new APIs to proactively report your device’s energy consumption to Alexa, or let Alexa estimate the energy used by your devices. Plus, if Alexa has a Hunch that a customer is away and forgot to turn off a light, you can enable Alexa to automatically turn it off with Hunches —helping your customers conserve energy without even thinking about it.

By integrating Alexa’s energy dashboard, you can make your existing and new devices smarter and more appealing to an increasing number of customers who are looking to make their homes more sustainable. Customers can see if your device supports the energy dashboard on the Amazon.com energy dashboard webpage and on your product’s detail page, differentiating your product and building confidence that they can track and save on energy usage. With the energy dashboard, we aim to make it easier to make a positive impact on the planet and we invite you to join us in making a difference together. Start integrating today.

You can now integrate your devices with the energy dashboard in two ways: You can either report the energy consumed by your devices directly to Alexa, or you can enable Alexa to estimate the energy consumed by your devices by providing the required power metadata (e.g. wattage for lights) for your device. Based on your device type and energy reporting capabilities, you can implement one of the new APIs below.

Report Your Device's Energy Consumption to Alexa
You can now proactively report the energy consumed by your compatible devices to Alexa using the new Alexa.DeviceUsage.Meter.API. Alexa will then show the cumulative energy usage data to your customers by day, week, or a month on the energy dashboard. This new API allows you to specify the unit of measure (e.g. WATT_HOUR, BTU), the frequency of reporting energy consumption data (up to once a day), and specify if the energy reported is an estimate or an actual reading tracked by the device. Aquanta, Awair, Rheem, and TP-Link will be among the first to report energy consumption data for smart lights, smart plugs, and water heaters by integrating with energy dashboard in the coming months.

Let Alexa Estimate Your Device’s Energy Consumption for You
For devices such as smart lights and TVs, you can let Alexa estimate your device’s energy consumption and show customers estimated energy consumption in the dashboard. To enable Alexa energy estimates for your devices you can now use the Alexa.DeviceUsage.Estimation API to report the required power rating metadata such as On & Off wattage to Alexa as part of your device’s discovery response. Alexa will use your state and change reports to determine how long a device has been on and combine this with the power metadata you provide to estimate your device’s energy consumption in the Alexa app. For example, when combining On wattage for smart lights with the PowerController, BrightnessController, and ColorTemperature change reports, Alexa will determine the amount of time the light was on and estimate the energy it consumed.

Additionally, for smart lights, switches, and plugs used to control lights, and TVs that already report state changes for the Alexa PowerController API proactively via state and change reporting, your customers can simply enter the required power metadata directly in the Alexa app to start tracking the estimated energy used on your device. This is particularly useful for switches and plugs that don’t have energy monitoring capabilities and also don’t know the power rating (e.g. wattage) of the device they control. Phillips, Hisense, Tuya, LIFX, Sengled, eWelink and Alea Labs will be using energy estimation for their devices that don't currently support energy tracking.

For smart thermostats, you can now use the new Alexa.ThermostatController.HVAC.Components API to send Alexa change reports that include On/Off states and time stamps for each of the heating and cooling elements that your thermostats control. Alexa uses this component level data along with customer inputs, such as approximate square footage of their home, to estimate the energy consumed by the Heating and Cooling system controlled by the thermostat. Join brands like Resideo’s Honeywell Home Solutions and Emerson who are offering this capability to their customers.

You can get started integrating your compatible devices with the energy dashboard today by viewing our documentation below.