Somfy defends the connected home to reduce its energy consumption

Discover the full interview with Marc Westermann, Product and Solutions Manager at Somfy in podcast:

While Somfy was able to take advantage of the health crisis linked to Covid-19, its stock market price having fallen from €72 in May 2020 to €170 at the end of 2021, the specialist in motorized shutters and blinds suffered the repercussions of the crisis. which ensued, seeing its share fall back below €100. The shortage of components has passed through this, but for Marc Westermann, product and solutions manager of the brand, “trends are promising over the long term“.

Moreover, the Cluses group, in Haute-Savoie, could well benefit from the crisis which has just set in and is this time impacting energy supplies. Somfy is campaigning for a connected control system in housing, and sees it as a solution to achieve energy reduction objectives. Does Ademe not estimate around 15% the potential reduction in the energy bill linked to the installation of a connected thermostat? Such a device effectively makes it possible to manage the heating periods as well as possible and to avoid consuming energy unnecessarily when its housing is empty.

For Marc Westermann, the windows and shutters of the apartments are also great heat regulators. In summer, lowering your blind or closing your shutter reduces the heat entering your home. Conversely, in winter, opening them allows the sun to enter and naturally increases the heat. Common sense you say. And of course, such practices do not necessarily require a connection…

Thanks to its Tahoma connected home automation box, the group offers to control its equipment via its smartphone and thus play on the temperature of its home thanks to pre-established scenarios. The group even calls for a multi-year strategic plan to help households equip themselves with the best equipment and thus reduce their energy consumption, France being fond of these famous state aid plans to get things moving…

Matter, or the effort to simplify

But when it comes to connected home and home automation, some see it as a war of proprietary protocols between manufacturers that makes it all difficult to manage on a day-to-day basis. Good news ! The Matter protocol, which aims to simplify the installation of connected objects via a universal communication standard, finally arrives in version 1.0. In negotiation since 2019, the certification of this protocol has been dragging on since 2021…

As we mentioned recently, Matter brings several significant advantages in the connected home. It allows most home automation objects to communicate with each other and to be controlled with a single interface (no need for an app per gadget). It also requires the encryption of communications and the possibility for all compatible accessories to be managed via the local network. Thus, even in the event of an Internet outage, or if the manufacturer disconnects its servers, Matter-related devices should retain some of their functionality.

But this beautiful promise will have some constraints. As Marc Westermann reminds us, “not all products will be compatible. In the new generation compatible Matter, it will still require gateways to talk with the products of the previous generation“… If the simplification effort is on track, it will be difficult to escape a phase of cohabitation between the old and the new world.