Networked Fridges 'Negotiate' Electricity Use 217
An anonymous reader writes "Researchers have developed a way to network household and commercial fridges together in a distributed peer-to-peer fashion that lets them 'negotiate' with each other on the best time to consume electricity. A retrofittable controller is attached to each fridge and then a temperature profile is built around the unit. The controller enables communication between other fridges on the network and also the power source. It enables fridges to work together to decide when to cool down, and thus consume power, based on how much surplus power will be available, and to anticipate power shortages and change their running schedules accordingly to use as little power as possible during these times."
Cold beer (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Cold beer (Score:3, Funny)
Fridge Skynet is evil. It might well happen.
Re:Cold beer (Score:3, Funny)
Fridges may be cold-blooded killers, but still need human assistance. [darwinawards.com]
Re:Cold beer (Score:3, Interesting)
why not simply make higher efficiency fridges? I was able to convert a chest freezer into a fridge that uses about 1/4 the energy that the best performing energy star fridge can do. It works great.
all they need to do is increase the insulation in current fridges and improve the door seals. that alone would make a HUGE improvement. Granted I get an added benefit from not having a door that empties the fridge of all it's cold air every time it's opened, but the biggest gains are from the seal and 6" of insulation all around it.
Re:Cold beer (Score:2)
What did you insulate with? I have a plan to do the same thing. Were you able to just turn down the thermostat, or did you have to bend it? And did you just add a second seal, or replace it, and if the latter, what did you replace it with?
Re:Cold beer (Score:5, Interesting)
Set them outside overnight and allow them to freeze. Place them in the fridge and viola! you've just added some really cold mass to your fridge. When the bottles have thawed, set them back outside to freeze. This is like an old-fashioned ice box, and will reduce the amount that the fridge needs to work to keep the interior cold.
I suggest using small bottles, = 1 L, so that they freeze and thaw more quickly, and so that the amount of ice in the fridge can be adjusted as food is added and removed from the fridge.
Re:Cold beer (Score:3, Informative)
Heh, you're thinking well, but you've overcomplicated it.
The heat loss when you open the door is a function of delta_temperature and MASS of the air exchanged. A fuller fridge will lose less of it's cold air simply because there is less cold air to lose. This is of course assuming that the fridge door is open for a relatively short amount of time, long enough for air transfer, but not long enough for the items in the fridge to sink a significant amount of the heat from the (now warmer) air.
Once you close the door, you're left with a smaller mass of air to cool inside the fridge than with an emptier fridge. The key is closing the door before the HUGE mass of air (the open atmosphere) can dump its practically infinite (for our purposes) amount of heat into the lower temperature items inside the fridge in order to balance the temperatures.
Re:Cold beer (Score:3, Insightful)
There are real, and hard, limits on how efficient you can make them - most installed refrigerators are going to have to fit into a standard slot. Increasing insulation means losing internal capacity, and remodeling a kitchen to increase the size of the 'slot' is expensive even where practical.
Re:Cold beer (Score:5, Funny)
My fridge better not negotiate its way out of cold beer at 7 AM.
There -- fixed that for you.
Re:Cold beer (Score:2)
Or 7am. How else will I eat my Cheerios?
Re:Cold beer (Score:3, Funny)
Drinking most American Beers warm is like recycling urine. Without benefit of the recycling machine. Having your mouth and throat numb is a feature, not a bug.
First hack (Score:2, Interesting)
The first hack for those fridges should be a power hog : a fridge that tries to steal as much power as possible from the other fridges. In any cooperative, some will try not to cooperate.
Re:First hack (Score:3, Interesting)
The article is looking at this as a way of using things like home renewable energy in the most efficient way.
Personally I think this is also something that would work well on the 'grid'. Power companies work most efficiently within a small band of demand, when demand falls it is inefficient for them to stop running certain plants and when demand increases the cost of activating dormant supply is high.
If your house was 'aware' then power companies could dynamically vary power prices within a certain range to try and shape demand to a more normal distrobution. If energy storage tech got more advanced it might even go as far as people fitting small batteries/capacitors/flywheels within their house, that way you could charge power during the night when the power companies currently have an over-supply and drain it during the peak hours.
To give a real life example of this kind of behaviour, most labs working with plants (in the UK at least) will light their grow rooms during the very early morning. This is because they can get a large discount on energy during certain hours simply because the energy companies were going to generate and waste the energy if they didn't sell it.
Re:First hack (Score:2)
It's called "leave the fridge door open, tape the button down". Though it IS a horribly expensive way to heat your kitchen.
Re:First hack (Score:2)
I'm all meme'd out now :-(
And yet you completely missed the "beowulf cluster of fridges" joke. There was also the possibility of "cold grits" modification meme, and an outside shot at a soviet russia joke.
Obligitory (Score:2, Funny)
I for one, welcome our ice cube dispensing overlords
How does this actually solve a problem? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:How does this actually solve a problem? (Score:5, Informative)
That's because you didn't RTFA.
It's about renewable energy and making the most of solar/wind. I.e. ensure that excess solar energy is used up during the day by cooling the fridges an extra couple of degrees so they don't have to use base load power over night.
RTFA, you might learn something.
Re:How does this actually solve a problem? (Score:2)
Oh, how interesting. Now I don't have to RTFA. Thanks!
Re:How does this actually solve a problem? (Score:2)
Slashdot has articles?
Reducing peaks (Score:2)
I assume the idea is *not* to level the load from fridges alone, but to cut it at peak times: e.g. just before everyone switches on their kettle, flushes the loo etc during the advert break of a blockbuster movie on TV you ask *all* fridges to take break for 15 minutes to help flatten the peak.
Re:Reducing peaks (Score:2)
you ask *all* fridges to take break for 15 minutes to help flatten the peak.
There's a critical difference between this system and more traditional systems that turn off things like pool pumps and water heaters. The fridge can say *no* and still turn on if it needs to in order to maintain the proper temperature for safe food(or whatever needs cooling, like vaccines). It can apparently also learn to cool things down more when there's excess power.
A single salmonella outbreak or even a need to dispose of the contents of a fridge will outweigh an awful lot of 'power savings'.
Re:How does this actually solve a problem? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Not insightful. (Score:5, Insightful)
How does a post where it is clear that the poster didn't RTFA get modded insightful?
Moderators never RTFA either.
Yes, but... (Score:2)
Well, there are all sorts of points of technology, even this one. But I think that a key factor of TFA is being missed by the posters here, which is that this system is meant to cool a dedicated thermal mass stored within the fridge. Unfortunately, TFA doesn't go into detail but I've seen others that do. Part of optimizing such a system is to maximize that thermal mass, maybe through such simple techniques as having people keep a few gallon jugs of water in the fridge at all times, perhaps through integrating things like slabs of cement into the interior of the fridge. Either way, the greater the mass within the insulated envelope, the longer the viable interval between periods of active cooling.
In short, put more stuff that stays cool within the fridge and you can leave the chilling means turned off longer.
Re:Yes, but... (Score:2)
I was thinking the same thing when I was reading the article and comments - in order for this to be really useful you need to increase the thermal mass of the fridge so the fridge has much more play of when to turn on.
I figure a slab of concrete would be a poor choice; as you state, a couple gallons of water would give you quite a bit of thermal mass in a convienent to add/remove manner - allowing cheaper shipping, then fill the reservoir on site.
If nothing else, most fridges are installed in places with water taps. Concrete would have to be delivered.
Not just fridges. (Score:2, Troll)
People should do the same.
"Hey Bob, I'm cold. Do you mind turning off the tv so I can turn up the heat a bit?"
"Ask Steve. He's been using the oven for an hour already."
"Fuck you Bob. I'm making pizzas, I won't turn my oven off."
"You're a dick. Why don't you stop eating pizzas? You fat bastard."
"Shut the hell up Bob. Turn off your ass dildo and you'll have power for the heat."
IPv6 Adopters Rejoice (Score:4, Insightful)
We've been joking about it for years, but we finally have an answer for the ages-old question of "why would I need an IP address for my fridge?"
Now, we just need some compelling reasons for networked sinks, sponges, cutlery, and microwaves. Not Talking Toasters [youtube.com] though. They'd keep us on IPv4 for another decade.
Re:IPv6 Adopters Rejoice (Score:5, Interesting)
More's to the point, why would you need an EXTERNAL IP just for your coffee machine ?
Connect your appliances on a traditional network, then map the 10.0.0.* addresses to ports on a single external IP ?
It's one thing for you to talk to your fridge from the car, but quite another to start dealing with inter-appliance politics ... "Dave, the toaster oven is being nasty to me and stealing all my power again".
Re:IPv6 Adopters Rejoice (Score:2)
The devices need to talk to other devices in other homes, and doing this in IPv4 is a hack.
Re:IPv6 Adopters Rejoice (Score:2)
For security reasons, I'd prefer to have the only outside contacts managed through some sort of central server. Wouldn't want some joker turning my fridge up to 98.6F for six hours while I'm at work. Or turning my oven onto 'self clean' for 8 hours, etc... It'd be much easier to keep 1 server secure than dozens of different devices from almost as many makers. Depending, the logic shouldn't be too hard, could even be built into future routers.
Re:IPv6 Adopters Rejoice (Score:2)
More's to the point, why would you need an EXTERNAL IP just for your coffee machine ?
Connect your appliances on a traditional network, then map the 10.0.0.* addresses to ports on a single external IP ?
It's one thing for you to talk to your fridge from the car, but quite another to start dealing with inter-appliance politics ... "Dave, the toaster oven is being nasty to me and stealing all my power again".
The problem is going to be communication between the devices and the rest of the world.
We support a couple larger clients that are running some kind of IP-enabled power meters on their buildings. This lets the local power company read their meters in realtime - no estimating, no sending a guy out once a month. It gets these companies a nice discount on their electricity bill.
The way those meters are set up, the polling is initiated by the power company. We got a little worksheet from the power company that instructed us in which ports to open, and asked us for the IP address that they'd be polling.
That works fine for these larger clients who can afford to have someone manage their IT infrastructure - either in-house or outsourced. But what about your average home user? Is every home user going to be expected to run through a worksheet for each appliance they buy?
Obviously, if you've got a half-dozen devices sitting behind one public IP you can't have them all listening for connections on the same port. You'd have to give each device its own port. Maybe all refrigerators would use port 666... But what if you had two refrigerators in your building?
You could have them initiate an outgoing connection to your electric company. Instead of having the company poll you, you just submit your data. That'd actually work pretty well... Unless the electric company has a reason they don't want to do that.
Good idea, but we can do better (Score:5, Interesting)
I had a similar idea, but more general.
Re:Good idea, but we can do better (Score:4, Interesting)
You could accomplish this with intelligent X10 outlets and some coding. Srsly.
Re:Home appliances automation protocol (Score:3, Informative)
I'd highly recommend going with INSTEON, or building your own custom modules that use WiFi to communicate instead of the powerline. Not many houses have more than 254 outlets in them, so you'd only need a Class C of private address space for your house. I'm not sure if 254 outlets/devices can connect to a single 802.11g/n access point though.
Re:Home appliances automation protocol (Score:2)
You can get cool OEM boards here [digi.com], and a cool dev kit with 5 different modules here [digi.com].
Re:Good idea, but we can do better (Score:5, Interesting)
That's called USB isn't it? :-)
Seriously, it's a good idea but you'll never really manage to standardise it in a way that brings in into an ordinary house ("gadget" houses and those people who already own X10 networks don't really count as "ordinary" users).
What's needed, if you're going to do this, is a universal gadget that does some *very* useful things to the average householder. I would suggest things like... water leak detectors tied into the same system that can shut off the water supply to individual devices, smoke alarms, burglar alarms, entry control, baby monitors (bring the house lights up gradually in the nursery when the baby cries) etc. all tied into the same device. The trouble is that any one facility doesn't really make a killer app and there are individual devices that do each job perfectly but the "universal" device that can demonstrate lots of useful benefits brings far too much cost into the equation (at the moment). Even X10 is prohibitively expensive for simple tasks, but I can buy a pair of remote-RF-controlled 13-amp-switching 220v mains sockets (with remote & 12V battery in every pack) for £5 from my local electronics shop.
I've often looked at automating my house... I have the hardware (opto-isolated I/O boards, relays, spare PC's, tons of logic chips and processors, not to mention cabling, wireless modules, remote sockets, sensors etc.), I have the skills (soldering, wiring, simple logic devices and processors, programming), I even have enough money to do a lot of these things. The problem is that it's much easier and cheaper to just buy a cheap baby monitor, a cheap burglar alarm, a cheap timer, a cheap energy monitor and not let them talk to each other.
However, if we were to establish a real, authenticated standard for automated house control protocols that all of these things could start supporting with a $5 chip plugged in their mains plug, then these systems would build themselves. X10 was supposed to be that, but a quick search for X10 in my country either produces lots of websites without prices at all (scary enough) or things like £50 for a single X10 mains module that then needs controllers, additional modules etc. before anything interesting can really happen (and then it is mostly basic stuff).
It's actually less than half the cost for me to buy my off-the-shelf remote-control socket, rip the remote apart (I get one with every mains module anyway, so I have a big stack of spares), take a wire from the button and plug it into a £20 USB I/O kit from Vellemans and write a bash script to do all the fancy stuff... I can already get temperature, I can already monitor electricity (again, cheaper with a £10 energy monitor from the same shop and either a bit of creative disassembly or a webcam reading the 7-segment digits off it).
This sort of stuff won't go big until there are set standards, that are ubiquitous and start getting included in *everything* (therefore cheap), so that the average homeowner ends up with at least two devices that support it without realising and then thinks "Mmm... these say they can talk together... I wonder what I need to do that?". It's how it worked with Bluetooth... nobody cared or could see the point until you are sitting in your living room with someone else who has Bluetooth and you want to exchange phone numbers etc. When enough people have it to get interest in the general populace (everyone KNOWS you can do this stuff if you have the money), then you can start standardising. But you can't standardise until enough people have it. :-)
Re:Good idea, but we can do better (Score:2)
water leak detectors tied into the same system that can shut off the water supply to individual devices
Requires a solenoid valve and power supply at each device, not to mention communication.
The REAL reason this hasn't happened yet is because no one has done it. If as you say you have all the parts and skills, why don't you put together a prototype system instead of coming to Slashdot and telling us all the reasons why you can't do it? Then you can start a company and just DO it.
99% of this stuff can be retrofit. A refrigerator in particular only needs some temp sensors run into the unit, the thermostats dialed all the way up, and a device installed inline to turn the fridge on and off. A coffeemaker just needs one little infrared sensor strip to determine pot level, and a switch installed. Et cetera. Shit or get off the pot, but no one wants to know why you're not doing it - we already know why we aren't.
Re:Good idea, but we can do better (Score:2)
Isn't my point that retrofit is a bit of a waste of time because it means the buyer making a specific choice to do this, whereas what's needed is ubiquity (via an established standard, e.g. BS (British Standard), ISO or equivalent specifying a protocol) so that it becomes standard, therefore attract cheap compatible devices and makes them compete on the basis of cost?
Retrofitting is a nightmare for everyone - the person doing it, the product you're doing it to, the original product manufacturer, the retrofit product and the company making the retrofit products. For instance, my refridgerator would probably NOT like that device you just described - the power spikes of on/off at full blast from the mains would blow its little tiny mind (not to mention the house fuse if it coincides with anything else - which it may well do if, say, a door is opened and the temperature of a room changes hitting the whole room) because it does a soft-controlled startup/shutdown to stop the spikes from the motor going back into the household electric. It wouldn't be a generic retrofit device, because of things like this, as it would only fit a handful of compatible products. It would probably void my warranty on the fridge even if no permanent modifications had to be made, because it wasn't designed to be turned on and off from the mains like that. The manufacturer of the retrofit device itself would probably offer no warranty and certainly wouldn't replace my fridge or guarantee compatibility. All of the same comments apply to anything that you do like this. But if you start BUYING this stuff with these things built-in and it costs only pence more, then it's starts coming into every household.
All this stuff already exists as complete products - coffeemakers that only boil what they need, devices that shut themselves or the mains off when they detect a leak/fault (gas, water, there are devices for both). The point is that non of them interoperate and, because the ones that do are so expensive, the details of how they operate are hidden away and the only people to sell compatible devices/controllers are those that are in a position to charge what they like for them, which makes all the devices expensive, even the silly £5 wall-plugs that are for sale for up to £100 instead but still doing the same job.
It's a vicious cycle that gets broken by a recognised standard for home automation (one may already exist somewhere, but if it does, it's pretty pathetic in terms of industry recognition!) and then a tiny, cheap, sub-licensed, mass-produced generic chip.
Say there was a chip, that had precisely two inputs that connected directly to the mains (e.g. live and neutral, so no intermediate electronics), could fit into a plug or a device itself and provided a mains-serial bus that anything could connect and transmit on with a similar chip. You could start with just a generic plug that advertised it's presence and UUID (probably built-into the chip, ala Bluetooth, WLAN, Ethernet, RFID, etc.). That would show presence of any and all devices in the house.
A simple, tiny, extra input line on the chip (not mains voltage, but logic-level) to measure voltage/current (literally, a handful of components and, on the chip-level, something that can be included in the core of a mass-produced chip or by tying to a 20 pence standard chip) and you've got a whole house electric monitoring system for a handful of pounds. A couple of GPIO lines on the same chip and devices can put any and all data they want onto the bus... you've now got a system that can do ANYTHING - the kettle can tell you when it's boiled, or current water temperature, the washing machine can shut itself off overnight if there's a controller with a time/date chip somewhere on the bus, every device can detect power faults, every device can advertise extra features and react on input.
This sort of chip can be made really cheaply today, now, this second. I can buy a baby monitor that uses digital audio real-time communications over the main
Re:Good idea, but we can do better (Score:2)
Re:Good idea, but we can do better (Score:2)
Re:Good idea, but we can do better (Score:2)
Sounds like some of the ideas from Friedman's _Hot, Flat, and Crowded_. House/building controller that in turns buys power from the providers. The books a good read.
Re:Good idea, but we can do better (Score:2)
It's already been built: you just designed the home version of Regen Energy's system [regenenergy.com].
Re:Good idea, but we can do better (Score:2)
Great. Now, when my HD projector comes on but the sound system doesn't, I'll know that to solve the problem I should debug the house's electrical system controller.
Re:Good idea, but we can do better (Score:2)
BTW, X10 relay outlets reliability is shit, BTDT. Good idea, implementation is just too cheap.
Also, I don't think I want my oven "dithering" its temperature profile while I bake, I have enough problem getting consistent results without a casino oven in the loop.
A cold day... (Score:2, Funny)
It will be a cold day not only in hell when these networked fridges form a hive mind and decide that they don't need us any more.
And here we thought that Skynet would come from more unmanned aircraft.
We forgot that we need our food so we could fight the machines.
Comment removed (Score:2)
Re:Sounds like industrial demand-ratchet control. (Score:2)
I have been thinking about this for years..... (Score:2)
The electrical power grid could benefit from a number of these sorts of things.
Many high current devices are periodic in nature. Water heaters, electric baseboard heaters, refrigerators, toasters, etc.
There should be a protocol, like X10 or something, that defines a maximum power profile, and all the appliances negotiate "bandwidth" ala USB.
Beyond even that, we have a ridiculous number of redundant appliances, how many get hot? Why should the oven, water heater, furnace, all produce a lot of heat and not share any bit of it. How many devices are heat exchangers? Air conditioning, refrigerators, water coolers, etc.
We need to start thinking about these things in a complementary and systematic sense. In most houses, the refrigerators extract heat from the box and release it in the house. In the winter, this is a good idea. In the summer, it wastes energy in the air conditioning. again, in the winter, in the north east, it could get cold air from the outside.
There is lots of "free" complimentary energy to be had and there is great savings in reducing overall current load, E=I*R and all that.
Re:I have been thinking about this for years..... (Score:2)
While I agree there is a potential benefit for such a system, it makes more sense to negotiate it at a whole-house level. This is superior from a privacy standpoint as well as that of complexity. Also, the system is simply more useful to the resident anyway. This is the kind of thing which could be immensely useful for people with alt.power systems.
I think we would do well to focus on eliminating or making more efficient these systems which currently are so wasteful. For example, in many places you could do away with air conditioning entirely even in an existing structure by upgrading insulation (some structures have uninsulated walls, so you can literally just squirt foam into them) and by installing an external heat-pipe heat-pump, and by painting the roof a light color.
Re:I have been thinking about this for years..... (Score:2)
Because piping hot fluids around at low temperature differentials is expensive and inefficient. And _sharing_ waste heat isn't really a big problem. If you're heating your house, the waste heat from the water cooler, water heater, oven, etc, all go straight into the house and take load off your furnace. You may lose a bit of efficiency (although the oven and water heater may be _more_ efficient than the furnace), that's all. A much bigger problem is getting _rid_ of waste heat. You could make all heat exchangers into split system units with an outside compressor, and/or put some other heat-generating appliances into a well-insulated "heat pipe" ventilated from the outside, but there's plenty of disadvantages to this approach, particularly cost, bulk, and flexibility.
Chill pipe to outside? (Score:4, Insightful)
Living in Canada where it is -25 outside right now, I have always found it an extreme waste of energy to be powering a fridge and freezer to keep things cold in a house I am paying out the nose to heat because it is so cold outside for 1/3 of the year or more.
How come new houses aren't built with some kind of a "chill pipe", kind of like an insulated duct line that routes outside air directly into the kitchen, that could be connected to the fridge? The pipe could be automatically closed or opened as the fridge detected the temperature outside.
Re:Chill pipe to outside? (Score:2)
For what it's worth, it isn't exactly the case that running the fridge inside the house during the winter is a total waste. The heat that is drawn from the fridge's interior is dumped into the kitchen, as is the electromechanical work expended by the compressor/condenser to move that heat around. So you are offsetting natural gas (or fuel oil, or wood - whatever heats your house) with electricity.
A greater problem is running the fridge during the summer, because you don't want that heat dumped into the kitchen. If your home has AC, you are using that AC to shuttle the heat removed from the fridge to the outside. A heat pump that allows the compressor/condenser to be cooled with 50-degree liquid from outside rather than 80-degree air inside seems a good way to go.
The main trick is checking how much additional electricity would be needed to cycle the fluid around - for a small installation, you might not actually come out ahead.
Today's nutty idea (Score:2)
Here in Toronto it's -19 C outside (-2 F). If there were a pipe to the outside air, with a thermostat controlling flow, during Winter there would be no need to consume cooling energy at all :| This would scale to refrigerators of any size...
oops, brunes69 beat me to it. (Score:2)
n/t
Re:Won't be useful to many people (Score:5, Insightful)
This probably isn't pitched at householders. I think it would be great for supermarkets, cold warehouses, booze shops, chemical plants etc... people who need commercial/industrial levels of refrigeration.
Re:Won't be useful to many people (Score:4, Informative)
Why yes, yes it is pitched at residential AND commercial sites. This is what "Lonworks" from Echelon is all about - energy management. The technology wasn't designed for just fridges, it was designed for EVERYTHING. Lighting, heating/cooling, dishwashers, laundry, etc. With its 64 bit addressing, it is intended to allow everything to communicate, and peer communications is a big part of it (as is negotiating when to "run".)
Anyway, these researchers should talk to Echelon. They solved this problem 12 years ago.
Re:Won't be useful to many people (Score:2)
Yeah. 'Cause I only want my lights to be on when everyone else's are off.
Re:Won't be useful to many people (Score:2)
Yeah. 'Cause I only want my lights to be on when everyone else's are off.
How about having some sort of occupancy senser, or ambient light one? Maybe some sort of automatic dimmer? On the other hand, consider commercial applications - would a billboard operator consider adding the system to the floods lighting the board if it chops his power bill in half?
The light would be pretty high up on the 'I'm using power NOW!' priority list. The important part of having lights on a system like this would be that the light is reporting it's status. This would be used to adjust the operating patterns of other equipment. Perhaps even powering some of them up more because somebody's there.
Re:Won't be useful to many people (Score:3, Insightful)
Um, they have exactly that... The PP was just being flamebait. Of COURSE you wouldn't want lights being turned off on you when you are in the room.
But here is the deal.... You really don't want someone else telling you when you can run your own stuff. What you want is things like "we have a peak load time, do what you can to conserve" and YOUR controller starts taking measures to do extra conservation based on your individual needs. Likewise, "we have a surplus, rates are lower right now" so run the dishwasher, etc. You can also do some time-sliced sync of compressors (not just fridges, but AC units too, but if you look at this on a grid-wide basis it's going to even out anyway. Better is to let your fridge warm a couple extra degrees (if your situation allows) during peak load times (not running AT ALL for a while.)
Going forward, we all need to do what we can to save / manage energy more efficiently. Let's use alternative energy sources "green power" to cut down on legacy power generation, cutting pollution, while at the same time cutting energy consumption to reduce need for legacy power even more.
Re:Won't be useful to many people (Score:2)
Not quite. How many addressable devices on one Lon segment?
Lonworks was a good idea when first proposed, but by the time it caught hold it was far to under-powered compared to other options.
BACNet is much easier to use for most applications today where ModBus can't work (peer to peer functionality on a common network-- Modbus is purely client-server)
Re:10,000 is a lot of fridges... (Score:5, Informative)
Well, there's a big difference between lab simulations and real-world trials. The previous paragraph suggests the largest trial they've done with real equipment consisted of seven small fridges and three larger industrial-sized coolrooms.
Also, it's not intended for single locations but rather for "every house in the city". There's little to be gained by smoothing out the energy usage of individual locations, even rather large locations.
Re:10,000 is a lot of fridges... (Score:3, Interesting)
There's little to be gained by smoothing out the energy usage of individual locations, even rather large locations.
My first thought was this would be useful if you're forced to run on a backup generator for a while; This sort of system would allow a supermarket or a largish home to run a smaller margin by not having to worry about every compressor kicking on at once. This would allow a smaller generator, and generators run more efficiently the closer they are to their max capability.
After the fridge protocol it shouldn't be too hard to come up with other cooperative units - pumps, even a monitor on other circuits so that when the washing machine is running the fridges try to avoid coming on.
On power district scales, there's already off-peak systems for things like electric water heaters. 240V@23-27A beats 120V@5A anytime, you know?
Re:10,000 is a lot of fridges... (Score:2)
On power district scales, there's already off-peak systems for things like electric water heaters. 240V@23-27A beats 120V@5A anytime, you know?
I'm guessing said in jest? 240 V @ 23 A is 5,520 watts of power, where 120 @ 5 A is 600 watts. You pay for watts, voltage and amps don't matter. Guess which one is more expensive? :-)
Re:10,000 is a lot of fridges... (Score:2)
I think there'd be some value to it even for a large individual location. At the very least, you could reduce the amount of electricity you use during peak hours of the day (large commercial customers are charged for electricity in part by the time of day). You could also use it to coordinate your electricity usage so that you don't have all the compressors turning on at once, which reduces your own peak current draw and puts less stress on the building infrastructure.
Re:Won't be useful to many people (Score:2, Insightful)
You would be surprised. A lot of people keep a second fridge (or, more often, a second freezer) in their garage or basement. There are also small "dorm" fridges that people use to keep beer, soda, whatever handy.
Re:Won't be useful to many people (Score:2)
US fridges tend to be, well... gigantic, at least compared to the average fridge over here. That's why most people I know indeed have a second one in the garage/basement: you just cannot fit a crate of beer plus all your other fridgatives in a single fridge.
So this doesn't sound like a totally stupid idea, it might actually be a pretty good one.
Re:Won't be useful to many people (Score:2)
These days, too, Costco/Sam's Club/BJ's Wholesale/etc. pretty much mean that you need a 2nd fridge and 2nd freezer to take advantage of the prices.
I still haven't bought that 4-pack of pianos, though.
Re:Won't be useful to many people (Score:5, Insightful)
If you extend it this could actually be useful...
Imagine you have a wind generator on your roof and several appliances connected. If the generator can't power all the devices simultaneously then they could negotiate with each other to smooth out the demand.
eg. If I put the kettle on to make a cup of tea the fridge could switch itself off for a couple of minutes. If I step in the shower all power can be diverted to the water heater, etc.
On a larger scale, smoothing out the demand could avoid building power entire power stations. This probably won't happen for the next 100 years, but one day it will.
Re:Won't be useful to many people (Score:5, Funny)
If I step in the shower all power can be diverted to the water heater, etc.
But what about the forward deflector shields?
Re:Won't be useful to many people (Score:3, Funny)
Yep ... I was going to put in a Star Trek reference but that would just have been karma-whoring.
Re:Won't be useful to many people (Score:4, Informative)
Yep ... I was going to put in a Star Trek reference but that would just have been karma-whoring.
Funny mods don't give you karma unless that's been changed recently. In fact you usually wind up losing karma because of the jackasses that like to hit every joke they don't get with an overrated mod.
There are quite a few ways to extend functionality (Score:5, Insightful)
Fridges as we know them are pretty sad contraptions with no shortage of room for improvement [typepad.com]. They put a whopping big heat source under the chamber they're trying to keep cool. They use room air from the hottest part of the house, even though in most homes that room is a foot or two away from outside air that is much cooler, if not actually even cooler than the fridge interior should be. In general, they're an agglomeration of kluges and marketroid idiocies. So yeah, this could be a key part of a rethinking of what a fridge is and how it works that could eventually cut power usage by as much as eighty to ninety percent. The same could be said of quite a lot of appliances and HVAC components. Hell, done right, we now know that comfortable homes can be built that require no conventional heating or cooling systems at all [nytimes.com].
Kinda makes you wonder why we're supposed to need this "smart grid" for all this massive increased demand we supposedly have no way to avoid, doesn't it?
Re:There are quite a few ways to extend functional (Score:3, Interesting)
It's easy to fix as a homeowner if you take the effort and are not a slave to the "fashon police" or are a style freak.
http://mtbest.net/chest_fridge.pdf [mtbest.net]
to change a chest freezer to a incredibly high efficiency fridge.
and simply locating the fridge with a ductwork system to use cooler basement air to circulate around the waste heat coils is not hard to do.
It's simply the fault that most homeowners know nothing about a home or construction and cant instruct the contractor, that wants to do as little as possible, what to do.
It's our culture of ignorance and apathy that propagates the really low efficiency appliances.. People dont shop for how efficient it is, they shop for how pretty and shiny and if it will match my paisley countertops!
Re:There are quite a few ways to extend functional (Score:2)
As long as you put energy-efficiency as your only consideration and ignore all the other things people want from a fridge. Sure, it'd be great to have a fridge that would vent its hot air to the outside in the summer (but keep it indoors in the winter), but doing that is expensive, takes up space, and (in some variants) means the fridge is no longer self-contained. Venting outside air into the fridge is also expensive and bulky, and has other problems (like filtering and humidity, and sealing when outside air _isn't_ wanted as well). 5 extra inches of insulation on the door bulks things up considerably.
Most people don't have energy efficiency as their #1, let alone only concern, when they're buying a fridge. How it fits in their kitchen, interior space, ease of getting food in and out of it, cost -- those are major concerns as well.
Oh, and if you're going to put extra thermal mass into a fridge you'd want to put it in the TOP, not the BOTTOM.
Re:There are quite a few ways to extend functional (Score:3, Funny)
more than 50% of my electricity usage was going towards making food lukewarm.
Welcome to slashdot, Ronald McDonald.
Who pays for it? (Score:2)
Obviously, the smart fridges and other appliances will be more expensive in the first place. So the utility companies would have to offer a rebate in electricity prices for households who participate, otherwise it won't be worthwhile for individuals. Alternatively, the smart appliances could be introduced by regulation (probably a worse approach, but still possible).
The rebate approach would require smart managers, the regulation approach would require a lot of political haggling. Either way, I guess it will take a while before this takes off :-P
Re:Who pays for it? (Score:2)
I don't think you'd have difficulty getting utility companies to chip in for a rebate program - they like the idea of smoothing out peak demand. In some locations you can already have the utility company install a remote switch on your home AC unit, which they can turn off during peak hours of the day. Some units have a local override, if you think you really need that AC.
In return, they reduce your rate.
Re:Won't be useful to many people (Score:5, Interesting)
Well it's not going to do anything to reduce an individual household's power usage; certainly nothing that couldn't be done with non-networked smart fridges, anyway. Most people just pay for the amount of energy they use; it doesn't matter if they consume it in large bursts or as a constant trickle.
This is intended for whole suburbs or cities to be able to regulate the energy draw from cooling fridges so as to decrease peak levels of demand. The other main thrust seems to be regarding renewable energy sources, in particular solar. The idea is that if cloud cover decreases the amount of energy being produced, the plants can tell the fridges and they can intelligently decrease their collective power draw. When the sun's out in full blaze and there's plenty of power being produced, the fridges can cool their interiors by an extra degree or two, effectively storing that additional energy to help them weather a shortage later on.
Air conditioning seems another obvious target for this technology, since most aircons cool for a while (using lots of power) and then just ran the fan (using little power) until the room heats up a bit, then they cool again. If you have 500,000 aircons all doing this, there's a good chance the power station is going to see big surges in energy draw. If they're all talking to each other, they could negotiate their cycles to place a more consistent draw on the power source, flattening out the peak.
Of course, I have no idea just how much fluctuation is common in the energy draw at our power stations, and whether this is a practical thing to pursue or just a really cool, clever idea with minimal practical applications.
Re:Won't be useful to many people (Score:2)
Thee are locations where the price of electricity varies with day time and modern fridges (at least here in Europe) can keep cold without using electricity for hours because I suppose they are so well isolated. But you are right about the real goal of the technology i.e. decreasing but not overall consumption but the peaks - if that is done the overall capacity of network can be optimized. OC such over-optimization makes the whole thing vulnerable to any changes in consumption patterns i.e. either network can collapse or outages may occur in some parts of it.
If there are more devices that can survive without constant supply of energy at least for a while then that may be acceptable.
I still have problems with my fridge talking with fridges of my neighbours.
Re:Won't be useful to many people (Score:2)
Re:Won't be useful to many people (Score:2)
Me too, hence my last paragraph. I don't recall ever hearing any power companies complaining about cyclical spikes in power draw as being a particular problem for them. On the other hand, they may have always just considered it a given and that there wasn't anything that could be done about it.
Nice theory. But not true. (Score:3, Insightful)
You might as well start with a spherical cow [wikipedia.org].
Humans are not random operators, especially in industrialized societies. Spikes can come in as little as fifteen to twenty seconds in a society like ours. Rush hour starts and within fifteen minutes you starts seeing a wave spreading away from centers of workplaces of air conditioners being turned on or up and lights going on as people get home. The Superbowl starts and everybody comes indoors from the barbeque to watch the game, air conditioners get turned up as the patio doors get shut. Ad breaks come and toilets all across the area flush within thirty seconds of each other all over the time zone. A big audience tv show has whispering or something else quiet and air conditioners get turned off so people can hear what's on screen.
We live in a society where most people get up around the same time, go about the same distances, stay away for about the same durations, and come back in to do the same damn things as big chunks of their neighbors for hundreds of miles around. And some of these things, like rushes during ad breaks or when a popular show ends have noticable peaks and drops that can be measured in tens of seconds. This doesn't even get into things like what happens when all the living soil is replaced with pavement and, for example, stormwater load spikes get much higher and then drop off much faster. And then, with all that water moving faster everywhere, again more people turn devices on and off to deal with the consequences.
No averages have nothing much to do with such demand at all.
Re:Won't be useful to many people (Score:2)
Here in Portugal (and Spain does it too) we pay a monthly fee dependent on our amperage limit, besides the normal metering. Right now we have to manually avoid having some "big" appliances like washing machines and heaters on at the same time, and when we forget it the meter limiter "halts" and we have everything unpowered 'till we wake up :(
That seems like energy conservation taken to a ridiculous extreme to me. If that's the future here then no thank you -- let's just build some nuclear plants and be done with it. What happens to customers with medical or other mission critical equipment? Is my oxygen concentrator gonna lose power because I forgot to turn the washing machine off before I go to bed?
Re:Won't be useful to many people (Score:3, Insightful)
That seems like energy conservation taken to a ridiculous extreme to me.
A model like this means that the people who use the most power pay for the production of those new energy generation facilities that you love so well, while those able to curtail their energy usage are rewarded by being charged less. It is essentially the only logical model. When we build a power plant in the USA, it costs ALL taxpayers some money, even if we live off-grid, because of bullshit subsidies and other nonsense.
Re:Won't be useful to many people (Score:2)
And just what is the fucking point anyway, I doubt this works any better than slight randomisation...
Correction... ICEnet (Score:4, Funny)
Those are not flying fridges - yet.
And it is quite obvious that should there be a nuclear war fridges would be the only things to survive.
Indiana Jones taught me that.
Re:What else? (Score:5, Funny)
Let's give every appliance a connection to the Internet!
Do you really want your Fridge wasting all day on Slashdot?
Re:What else? (Score:2)
Yours doesn't already?
Re:What else? (Score:3, Funny)
He's probably just got a really old fridge. He should probably go to Sears and get a new Kenmore fridge. They are on sale this week.
***this message was created by the Kenmore Energy Star Net+AI 21.7 Cu. Ft. Refrigerator***
Re:What else? (Score:2)
At least... (Score:2)
There will be plenty of ice cream. Only soylent green flavor, but hey...
On a downside, we will only be allowed to listen to Vanilla Ice, Ice Cube and Ice-T, and all movies will have a heroic fridge scene added to them.
George Lucas once again showed us how fucking brilliant a visionary he is.
Re:Scientists! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Scientists! (Score:2)
$70.00 embedded PC??? I can do this with a $17.00 arduino + $35.00 ethernet shield.
Re:Scientists! (Score:2)
Don't you think it would be a little more practical to do it with some $0.50 PIC (or $1 AVR) :) chips communicating via RS-422? It could literally cost you more to buy a nice power supply than to buy the chip. And ethernet is super maximum overkill for this job. You need an intelligent/active hub/switch to tie together large numbers of RS-422 connected devices because implementation gets problematic when you have lots of things on the same current loop. But if you ran just one pair of copper (or for future expansion, perhaps say four pair which is conveniently packaged for you already) alongside your power wires, just pull it right through all your electrical boxes and put a loop of slack in there to work with, then you could use it for automation without having to isolate signals from power lines. Put either a computer, a (your protocol on-)RS-422(or whatever) to ethernet interface, or hell, a multiport serial-to-ethernet that can handle such signals (the latter being my vote) next to the panel to handle the communications. These devices are expensive today in most cases (though not all) but could be built cheaply (perhaps from your beloved arduino) or sourced from some computer crap company going under and remarketed at a lower price.
A friend of mine once built a networked heating system for a geek house ("Darkwater"). Did he make it all intelligent? Fuck no. He just used a multiple or circuit and a bunch of thermostats. If any thermostat went on, it told the heater it wanted heat. Then the registers in the room were equipped with R/C car servos and PIC chips to drive them, when their input went high (the same signal going to the furnace control, naturally) they opened the vent as it was clear the room wanted heat. All you have to to do add A/C is add some switching upstream through the same methods. But all you have to do to network this system is to add one more cheapie little PIC, inside the thermostat. This one handles communications, exclusively. Then you expand from 1- to 2-wire communications with the systems which run the servos, so they can talkback. So long as you are careful about designing the system to match power requirements, you can run the servomotors from the communications lead, so you need only two wires to run all the sensors on a strand. I'm probably telling you a trillion things YOU already know, but then, the rest of the world can read this comment too, and it's early.
Re:Scientists! (Score:2)
No, and most pic's cost more than $0.05 in quantities under 10,000. you also need a ethernet-> serial interface and the Xjack is the only choice for that if you want it cheap. ($18.99 in 1000 quantity.
so in production, I can add the cost of manufacture about $30.00 per fridge if you include board and programming... But I'm talking 1 off that I can buy with my credit card and get running in 20 minutes after the package arrives 2 days later.
Re:Scientists! (Score:2)
And you fail the reality test again. (Score:5, Insightful)
What's your point? There are thousands of things that people "could" do that they don't. They could superinsulate their homes with dirt, straw, and a few weekend days. They could teach their kids the basics of astronomy in an afternoon or two. They could all show up at the polling place and vote for every single election. Hell, we could all build cantennas and have free wireless in every city in the world by the end of this week.
Reality isn't about what people in theory could do. It's about what they will do. And out here in the real world less than one percent of the population has the skills to do what you're suggesting and less than one percent of that one percent actually might. No comparison to a plan like this, not even taking into account the fundamental issues of determining protocols and load calculations.
Re:Scientists! (Score:2)
Does nobody here see the privacy concerns with this idea?
Re:Scientists! (Score:2)
Gasp! He's right! People will know when to call you and ask if your refrigerator is running! This is terrible! We must ban this before it starts to prevent those whippersnappers from tormenting us all!
Seriously. What the hell privacy issue is there with someone knowing when your refrigerator is running? Enlighten me.