GE Announces Quirky Aros Smart Air Conditioner That Syncs With Your Smartphone

GE and Quirky earlier today took covers off the newest product that has borne out of the collaboration, reports CNET. Called the GE + Quirky Aros, this is an 8000-BTU smart air conditioner. You heard that right. A smart Air conditioner. Wondering what sets the Aros apart from other members of his “cool” family? Let’s find out!

The Quirky Aros is an Air Conditioner that has been built ground up to be the part of a smart, connected home. Simply put, the Aros can communicate with your Smartphone, sync with it and learn from them various attributes pertaining to your location, schedule and budget. The Air-conditioner then uses this information to fine tune its performance. This would result in the machine maintaining an ideal temperature suited for you – while at the same time maximizing energy savings. The Quirky Aros boasts of a modern, slick look and gets capacitive touch buttons on its body along with a vanishing LED temperature display unit that simply disappears when the unit is not displaying the temperature.

As for “normal” air conditioner like features, like mentioned earlier, the Aros has a rated capacity of 8000 BTU and is apt for cooling medium sized rooms of up to 350 square feet (~17 x 20 feet). It gets three cooling modes and three fan speeds.

The smart part about Aros comes to light when you connect it to your smartphone after installing an application called Wink on your Android or iOS device. Once you do that, the Air conditioner would let you monitor, program, and control the air conditioner from anywhere. That is not all. The application would also track your usage and adjusts its operations all by itself to save on energy costs. Like with the case of Google Now, Aros would also try to learn your daily schedule and would automatically get ready to welcome you inside an already cool home. If you are too far away from your location, it simply turns itself off since you are not expected soon. Your location is of course tracked using GPS! Then there is the budgeting option within the App that would let you keep a tab on the amount of power that needs to be delivered to it so that you don’t pay a bomb of a power bill.

According to Quirky CEO Ben Kaufman, the idea for Aros was hatched only in December and was based on a concept submitted by Garthen Leslie, a vet from the Department Of Energy official who was looking for predictive AC unit.

The Quirky Aros is currently available for Preorder from Amazon for a not too expensive price tag of $300.

Images Via Quirky