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Electric Company Using Power Lines for Data
Snags writes: "The local electric company PPL Utilities is testing a system to send electricity usage readings back to the company over its own power lines. According to a local newspaper article, they are using the TWACS system made by DSCI. I'm just hoping this doesn't interfere with other ideas for sending data over power lines."
Boy, I can't wait for the first time I can take a tcpdump of my electrical wiring in to dispute my bill...
:)
And how about a DDOS attack? Do I have to firewall off my toaster now?
I seem to remember that power companies were doing this way back in 1998... Am I wrong? or do I just need to put down the pipe?
  Well my power doesn't go out half as much as my DSL connection, I wonder if soon I could get Xcel as my ISP... hmmm
"Madness and Genius are separated solely by Degrees of Success." -Unknown
This would be a great way to bring high speed Internet connections to cities with large populations. By high speed I mean higher speed than current Cable/DSL connections. This would take us a step closer to being able to pipe audio/tv signals over the Internet.
~.Evanrude
this idea has the potential (get it?) to make a short in your network card a little more hazardous. This is a BOFH moment waiting to happen.
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
A proposal to use power lines in the UK for data transmission was dropped because of a number of difficulties, most notably the fact that HF radio (about 2MHz to 30MHz) would have been rendered unusable in urban areas. Street lamps made great quarter-wave antennas.
Now I'll be able to send a hojillion volts down the wire to those 5kr1p7 k1dd13 1337 h4x0r5 that keep DDoS'ing me off of Efnet. Well, I hope.
In Soviet Russia, Jesus asks: "What Would You Do?"
In ohio, they are doing this in several place,
In a small town (where I work) they have pretty progrewssive ideas on power and communications,
First they have community power, almost 1/2 the cost of Ohio Edison in the next town over. Second is community cable, once again much cheaper, third is cable internet access, $20 a month compared to Time Warners, which you can still get here,
NOW about a year ago Wadsworth put FIBER to every home in wadsworth, long term plans include long distance. AND the ability to selcetivly shut down electical stuff on peak demand, (just your air conditioner, etc) to avoid brownout, because of the above reasons , and one of the best public school systems in the country, population is exploding.
Wadsworth is a great town and I lived there during my high school years, BUT If i lived here again an axe and cutters would hit that fiber so fast it'd make your head spin. Shutting down services on your panel selectivly MY ASS.
Sig went tro...aahemmm.....fishing........
I read in this article (Wired magazine... not on the web), the total corporate history and research of this project idea.
Basically, big ass companies like AT&T etc.. did a lot of testing and decided that it was just too expensive to offer net over the powerlines. The main problem was that although one could effectively transmit data over the powerline.. once it hits a transformer the data is lost, and the only solution that 3 big companies could come up with was a device installed on each transformer to carry the signal, which is completely uneconomical and defeats the whole purpose of using the existing powergrid.
There is even a big scandal with another company that claimed they could overcome this problem.. and it turned out to be a total fake, and lawsuits galore occured.
Of course there is no problem with using the powerlines in your house to network... so Rock on Lan parties!
The communication uses the zero crossings of the 60Hz waveform--same as X-10. Last thing I'd want is my lights turning on and off when they do meter readings.
bp
Many power companies have fiber up on the high voltage towers - which generally terminate in metro areas and rural areas at power stations - they use it now mostly for substation monitoring and internal networking. However, given the bandwidth potential of this fiber - they've got the ultimate backbone available. They just need to get that last mile figured out - no easy task!
Top Most Bizarre/Disturbing Error Messages
I'm just a little bitter though because I submitted a similar story a week or so ago and was rejected. :o
It sounds like a neat idea, but I just hope it doesn't interfere with all my X10 stuff. The protocol is unreliable enough already, we don't need more problems !
I don't think I could live without it now
HydroQuebec, in the provinde of Quebec (duh!) tried this a few years ago (circa '97).
At the time, there were a number of obstacles that made this technology unworkable. If I remember correctly it had something to do with electromagnetic field sensitivity. The earth's EM and solar flares made the whole system too error prone, at the time.
This brings up another memory. A company, 10 years ago, had a cheap office wiring system that used the ground outlet as a network transport. With their adapter, any machine plugged (quite literally) was on the same network.
What made that idea (and company, I think) fold was the lack of security. Anyone could connect to your house's power outlet and get connected. Furthermore, there were no filtering devices that served as "firewall" between your house and the external power grid.
Like I need lag on my power, and lets not forget the script kiddies, this gives "ping of death" a whole new meaning.
"Hey I wanna watch tv!"
"Well, we have to wait until 3AM when every sane person is sleeping so we can have enough power..."
can't sleep slashdot will eat me
TWACS currently reads at 300bps. There's technology out there that will up that, but it isn't going to get anywhere near what's needed for a decent Internet connection anytime soon.
My husband has been working with DCSI for about 2 years on the system in NE WI and there have been a few issues with interference, but not with homes and shit. The pulses aren't strong enough to interfere with normal shit, though there was one incident of a substation - which sends time synch pulses out to individual meters - setting off the railroad crossing alarms every 15 minutes.
It's a better solution than using RF to transmit the readings back to the sub - most of those are using 900MHz to transmi and you can imagine what kind of problems THAT causes.
I don't have a solution, but I certainly admire the problem.
RWE Powerline have been offering 2Mbit/s down your powerline in certain areas of Germany for the best part of a year. Damn good idea!
Our competitor got their hands slapped pretty bad by the public utility commission for that one and had to eat the entire investment. There was just no justification for such fancy toys to handle such a low-tech task.
sPh
I like the idea of hacking my utility bill.. hAx0r some free internet while your at it.
KCPL in Kansas City, MO, has had this for years. Remote meter readings save them hundreds of thousands in wages per year.
i don't mind as long as they don't try to raise my electric bill because they are running electricity through the lines also...
-- Betting on the survival of the media industry is a serious risk. I advise investing elsewhere.
the bandwidth needed to send metering data down a 60 HZ line, is orders of magnitude smaller that what we consider "broadband" internet bandwidth.
i.e, this is not an internet access technology / application.
I'm just hoping this doesn't interfere with other ideas for sending data over power lines.
Trust me, it will. The model will be developed first as a way to read meters, and second (maybe) as a way to provide internet access. EVERYONE needs electricity, only some people can't live without high speed internet. The power company will implement it's meter reading first, and maybe, if you're lucky, implement a web access service, but you can bet that if it interferes at all with power or meter reading, it'll be cut as fast as they can cut it.
~ now you know
IIRC from my tour of a substation years ago, electricity suppliers use power line carriers (PLC) to communicate between substations to relay switching information. If you happend to be driving by a substation, look for these large cylinders called wave or line traps, that are used to "capture" the RF signals...Cool stuff especially since they are operating on something like a 500kV line. Probably a much simpler modulation scheme though.
"Karma can only be portioned out by the cosmos." -Homer Simpson
The high speed data over mains, as they are testing in the netherlands, has been shown to create massive disruption to radio services. It would take a real lot of money to bribe (lobby) the FCC/congress to allow this in the US, money which would be hard to raise considering the dismal state of the telecom industry.
The service indicated here seems appropriate for telemetry. I wonder if they have accounted for security in control situations though. It may be too easy for someone to forge a packet. Still, at 300 baud (or what that bps?) its interference problems maybe be far less.
I suspect taht the major cost of providing wired Internet access is the rights-of-way. I don't think that routing data around transformers, even at a cost of a few hundred dollars per transformer, would be a big deal in comparison. Those transformers probably require more maintenance than that over a few years.
We canned the idea for Internet, but this application sounds ideal; low bandwidth, low contention (presumably), and if it goes wrong, you can always send the legacy meter readers around in a van... Or you could upgrade all your kit, I wonder which one they'll opt for...
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
I hear that there is a scandinavian nation that does the same thing, except data is sent back over a modem.
Power Company Manager: Damn that NoMoreNicksLeft!! He's somehow managed to use only 1 microwatt of power again this month. Damn him.
Imagine it - using chemicals in your water supply
to transfer data. Since water flows one way, your
return pipe is the sewer, of course. And for all
those who fail to pay their bills, there's always
dioxin...
I was talking to my electrician. He will be updating the electrical input into an old farmhouse from 100 amp to 200 amp (due to increased load from some due future renovations). I asked about some of the new houses in the area getting "400" amp hookups, which, according to him, are technically 2 200s but with the loss become 380s.
/. article is like writing an article due to an Iron Chef's new use of onion in a dish....
He mentioned that you can go higher than the 400 amp hookups with commercial and industrial hookups, but the electrical company meters all of those automatically. Not only are they metered automatically, they can be boosted or constrained depending on power requirements in the area.
Given that the water company uses a wireless setup to meter water use in my area, and the power company does the above, I don't see why sending a small bit of information back over the lines is that big of a deal. It's all been done before. Making this a headlining
Nothing new, this is pretty old technology.
Novell patented 2mb/sec over power lines like 4 years ago.
http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20010112S0051
There's very little in common. TWACS works by doing phase-shift modulation on the 60Hz carrier; this is a wonderfully robust method when implemented correctly, but at best you get a bandwidth of a few tens of bits per second. This is great for reading power meters (where a few bits per hour is plenty of bandwidth) but it has nothing to do with high-speed internet connections.
I've always hated the idea of having lots of DC transformers for every bit of electronics equipment I own. It would be much cooler if I could re use my Cat5 cable as a DC power system. Obviously this would need to be thought about carefully, and I would need to make sure I labelled the outlets carefully.
I think the probablility of this being hacked is extremely high. With radio interference, and power connections so available, it would seem simple to send rediculous transmissions. Of course it won't effect anything for good.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
Bukkake?? Bukkake? I spooge on your hair you slope MF.
I was outside the house the other day and noticed that my electric coop had installed a new meter. Upon closer inspection I noticed a little red light on the meter. Curiousity was peaked so I called up a friend of my that works for the coop and he went into a long explaination about these new meters they are rolling out. He called them Turtle meters and a quick net search turned up http://www.turtletech.com/Products-Sales/standardt urtle.htm
To quote their website
It monitors kilowatt-hours and records peak and minimum demand. The data is time-stamped and is continuously transmitted across the utility's own power lines. As long as the meter has power, the Turtle transmitter can provide a count of short outages (blinks) and establish whether the transmitter is in power fail.
The Standard Turtle transmitter can be programmed to return one of eight different data transmission options. The time needed to transmit a complete packet varies from 13.9 to 27.2 hours depending on the amount of data being transmitted.
Which falls in line with my friend telling me that it can take a day to get a reading because they are using a super low frequency. So yeah, they can remotely read meters. But they have definite problems with lightning. My friend spends a lot of his time in the summer replacing the Turtle units in the meters because they fry very easily he says. But they are cheap enough that it is still cheaper than sending a meter reader to all the houses.
Hunt says they've been doing this since 1995, so its not new, but few people have seen it because it has taken a while to get them out.
During the dot bomb bubble, I heard about a company that had a high-speed method of data transfer along power lines. They "inscribed" the data in the magnetic field around the power lines.
The problem with this is and other high-speed data ideas is that when you are sending data across copper wire you must increase your modulation frequency to acommodate more data. That works great until you get to a power transformer and it scrubs the harmonics (and your corresponding data).
I guess fiber is the only long term solution until quantum data transmission becomes a reality.
-ted
Sounds like if this works, there'll be no more surfing the web with the good ol' laptop while in the bathtub... You'd be in for a big shock! (I know people who do this!)
The problem with going past the transformer has been solved by a handful of people, the large issue now is routing, since all things on the powerline propogate everywhere. We are actually working with one company has has successfully passed multiple transformers, but is still working on the routing issues. Can't wait to see the new line of Cisco Electric Meters =)
I think my local power company (FPL) is using a two way version of this for their ON CALL system. This lets them brown out selected appliances in your house (such as your water heater or Air Conditioner) for brief periods during high power demand. You tell them which appliances you will let them control and they install a special box between them and the power line. They only brown 'em out for brief periods (I forget what the max power cycling periods are). For this you get a lower rate on your power bill. Makes sense for some people.
An electric company in Britain was going to try internet access via power lines a few years back, but they dropped the plans because it turned out that it was incredibly easy to crack and acquire data.
That's exactly the point of the article... they are going to transmit data over the powerlines. It's a done deal.
Apparently they've overcome the transformer problem.
of the primary scientist, Luke Stewart, who claimed he owned proprietary technology that allowed PLC to work. Well he had no such technology, didn't know wtf he was doing, and after 2yrs of blowing about 2mill of investor money he's running from the federales. Don't let media fusion put a foul taste in your mouth for other companies who do have technology to get past the transformer, their issue now is just routing.
Perhaps technology like this can bring about (or widen availability of) varying power rates, i.e. power is actually cheaper at night etc. Right now I've got no incentive not to run all my appliances and AC in the middle of the summer stage X power alert, but if rates were adjusted dynamically based on supply and demand, I bet people would actually wait till nightfall to do their laundry and dishes.
I understand systems like these are available some places, and to bulk consumers, but it would be cool if everyone had them.
There is a fairly light discussion of the pros and cons of the broadband technologies (including powerlines) on the same site.
e4 e5
I live in Reykjavík Iceland, and the power company here has already implemented internet over powerlines, although only a few people are using it now it seems to work just fine.
I guess we can use this technology because the entire population is about 280.000 people (and about 260.000 of them use the internet) check out Fjöltengi even though most of you wont understand a word of that page, you can check out the pic of a chick using the magical-gadget on the main page.
Hitler's in the fridge.
...they are using the TWACS system made by DSCI.
Inside sources report that this service will be followed shortly by delivery of high-speed Internet access over the power-lines, using the TWATS system made by DVDA. Offering 10 times the speed of Cable or DSL providers, power companies expect to be THE providers of streaming Internet video within 5 years.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Since it is supposed to be most cost effective to produce electricity at a constant rate, rather than larger fluctuations, this was an attempt to do "traffic shaping".
Despite some initial misgivings about the unknowns, it has worked pretty well so far. Lots of folks (my family included) now make it a habit to delay starting the laundry or dishwasher until after 9pm to get the better rate.
I am not sure exactly which technology Puget Sound Energy is using to transmit the readings back to the home office. On each monthly bill, they have a bar graph indicating how much electricity was consumed in each of the rate periods.
-Steve
Hey, Windows users, there is no such thing as "forward" slash, there is only slash and backslash.
Ce n'est pas une bonne idee. Il n'y a pas beaucoup des personnes qu'en utilserait. La future depends de la companie qui produit les lignes les plus rapide, pas le plus facile de utiliser.
Ce n'est pas un sig.
I have two observations. First, electric and gas utilities were the ones that came up with the idea of trading bandwidth. They do not have any clue about the mechanics of high speed internet access, and I see no reason for them to get one any time soon. Furthermore, they are very protective about what happens on their power lines.
Second, as one in the wholesale side of the Power industry, the first thing that occurred to me on checking the internal website for jobs one day was "Why do we even still have meter readers in this day and age". It may have been a good blue-collar job in the past, but that one must go the way of the dinosaur as better technologies like this are developed.
Did anyone else notice that the TWACS site mentions one of the features of this system as being "load control"?
:-)
For the lay person, a "load" is whatever is drawing electricity... Sometimes people will have a remote-controlled cut out box on an AC unit, or a chiller, or a conveyor, etc. that the utility can control remotely when there's excessive loads on the grid (during those hot summer days). The customer gets a discount for allowing the utility to fuck with their power...
Only in this case, the load control is at the meter. This means that your power can be killed altogether... This is good and bad:
Good: No more sending linemen into the field to do disconnects of hillbillies or urban warfare specialists (ahem, gang members) that don't pay... just remotely shut down the power...
Bad: The uncorruptable database of paying customers gets corrupted by a highly paid clerk, and your power gets killed in the middle of a fragfest...
However, given that it's just electronics inside, there ought to be some way to blow it out with a nice EM field
because you CAN'T implement high speed internet over powerlines.
As others have pointed out, the main problem is that the power lines are not designed to handle that much bandwidth and sheild it from interference.
Me to! No way I'm going to let them use this new IP over 480V to stop power to my house! Soon as I see them put a kill switch onto my compressor, I walk out back and axe that line. Oh wait.
OK OK, I'll have to figure out how to fake out the black box. Sooner or later, they will make a black box that can't be fooled and throw you in jail for trying.
These brown out intiatives are pure evil. Let the freaking power companies build new plants, people! They have been telling you about impending shortages for 20 years. The bad economics of the early to mid 80's then the 90's and some power saving devices helped forstall the crunch, but you can't expect that to last forever. We can have boxes or we can just make more power for ourselves and keep things nice cheap and regulated.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
First time I've heard a scheme for moving pricing closer to the microeconomic ideal called "communism"!
sPh
Anything that sends high-speed data is going to require some way to get the signal around the pole transformer. For serious data rates (DSL and up), a router on the pole with a fibre-optic uplink to the headend is necessary.
There's a privacy issue with these things. If you have a receiver for the signals, you can watch the power consumption of everybody in your neighborhood. And if you have a transmitter, you may be able to turn some loads on and off. These things don't seem to have strong crypto.
"The Network in Every Room" by Gibbs, W. Wayt, it discusses at length the issue of home broadband over power lines. It suggests the broadband over power lines is unlikely in the US because we have a transformer for every few houses here. Apparently, in Europe they use transformers for large groups of homes. This cuts down on the number of bridges they need to keep the signal strong. This is necessary because the transformer would otherwise erase the signals. Alas, the article is not online. Check it out at your local news stand or library.
Reality is that which refuses to go away when I stop believing in it. --Phillip K. Dick (remove SPAM to email)
Am I missing something here? They're spending $160,000,000 to replace 200 meter readers getting paid $35,000 a year? That's about $7 million a year. Almost 20 years to recoup the investment, all to save a few hundred(?) complaints due to transposed digits, sheesh..
I'm just wondering what this will do to your radio/computer/TV/... I'm sure all your electrical applicances are safe, but I've never seen anything that says that your electronics are uneffected by putting a signal on your AC current. I guess I'd still go for DSL or cabel.
so why does the power company _need_ to know what your power usage is at all times? don't you think the DEA would like to know which residential customers switch 2000 watt loads on an exact 16 hour on / 8 hour off (etc) schedule? of course, power companies would *never* release information like that without a warrant...
That's funny, I thought the The Electric Company used television waves for data...
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
Well in PA rates didn't skyrocket....perhaps Cali should have done it right...
Absolutely. But California politicians didn't mind when the big players like Enron played the major part in writing California's deregulation legislation. Want to fix it? Call your purchased senator or congressman and urge them to vote for the McCain-Feingold bill.
High-speed Internet Access: Power Lines For Real
Linksys Incorporates HomePlug Networking
in the pacific northwest there's an arrangement where the power system is used to transmit data... but in a slightly different way.
since the power companies have uninterrupted easements (like a right-of-way, utilities have them everywhere) to everyplace where power flows, they use those areas to bury fiber.
so in a way it's the same principle - but using those "geographical/political" lines, not the actual power lines. There's a little less apparent "intrusion" (as perceived and expressed by a lot of posters here) and a lot more bandwidth. It also allows high-speed access to get out to rural utilities.
I think it's interesting how immediately parallel the two systems' physical architectures are anyhow - wherever there's data, there's electricity.
Makes sense. Unfortunately I know neither Jessica Alba nor do I know Heather Donahue.
not available where i live.
aDSL will have to do, darn.
--
making up good sigs is a hard thing to do.
Our electric company in Denmark, WI USA is moving to this type of scheme
Field tests have demonstrated bit rates in excess of 300 Baud, and an industry spokesman said that they have hopes to get the speed up to 1200 Baud by the time of the official rollout.
In response to this announcement, the Water Utilities Association issued a press release outlining their plans for a competing acoustic Internet service. They pointed out that sound travels faster in water than in gas, so they will be able to provide lower latencies. Experts remain skeptical, however. They point out that it will take years of additional research to solve the interference problems caused by 'flushing toilet syndrome'.
There are also rumors of work on a hybrid liquid-gas Internet service via sewer lines.
I plugged my modem line into the wall outlet, but I couldn't download a single piece of porn...
On the upside, though, my computer got f*cked...
Scientific American has a good article on this technology. The problem in the US is the design of the dirstribution system (that part that gets teh power from the transmission lines to the end user). In the US, their are transformers fro small groups of loads - so every 5 or 6 houses will have their own transformer (Thakes 480 to 220, as I recall), which must be bypassed to transmit data over power lines.
I see several reasons why twe won't be getting access from our power company anytime soon:
1. It's unlikely that enough customers will sign in each final node to cover the cost of installing and maintaing a transformer;
2. Given the variablity in quality, wiring type, grounding, etc, from house to house, the costs of getting and maintaining reliable service could be high;
3. Given the glut of fiber and the number of companies going under that own fiber, it may be cheaper to buy a provuder than buidout you're own interface.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
When I was working at Nortel for co-op, circa 1998, they were working on using powerlines for highspeed. This was implemented in the UK, and I recall it being around 1mbit in speed.
They still use it for schools and stuff, but I recall there was a problem with the modems melting/overheating...
It's all about tha rice!
Back in middle60s- early70s Soviets were designing system to transmit TV over power lines. Guess what people. Due to unstable nature, signal drop, lighthing, huge resistance of wires, polarity reverse(Ha.. Its' really common in US and Canada btw.:)and noise on power lines project was abandoned. Many other countries like Germany/Britan/France tried too.. with same luck. So now US all powerfull and strong if trying to repeat someone else mistake. LLLLOOOLLLLL don't you thing it's a waist of money. Fiber is only solution for the future.Copper wires are already on their limits.
You know why it's dangerouse to have cyber sex over phone line.?..
you will get electric shock.:)
Ok ok...phone line is only ~20V and ~100V if someone called...Now imaging 110V all the time. I'm not talking about poor people with 220V outlets in Europe.:)))) So fox if you're plaining to go with hydro internet. forget about cybersex.:)))LOL
Check the National Semiconductor catalog. The LM1893 power line transciever died long ago, and for good reason. It took a team of engineers to install any product using the chips. Thats because the carrier will not traverse power transformers. And what do utilities have a lot of ? Power transformers. You need a repeater to bridge every transformer in the system. Or run fiber or coax to each utility pole. Wasn't feasable in 1986, and I doubt that it is now.
Wrong. TWACS has been around since the 70's, and it works great since it uses low-frequency modulation of the 60Hz carrier. The system has a range of at least tens of miles from the sub-station to the meter (and back).
Freevo - Linux Multimedia Jukebox
As far as interference goes, the system has a very good comm performance, and it very rarely interferes with other equipment.
Freevo - Linux Multimedia Jukebox
Seriously though, people have been hacking their utility bills for over 100 years now. There's an amazing number of ways to fool an electro-mechanical meter using various devices.
One trick that I heard about was that some meters could be unplugged and plugged back in upside-down, thus making it run backwards....
Freevo - Linux Multimedia Jukebox
X10 cameras don't use X10 protocol over the powerline... They transmit wirelessly at 2.4 ghz...
Also, many companies are working on trying to use SCP over powerlines.... Supposedly more efficient then X10, more robust, and allows low bandwidth data transfer. Not succeptible to phase-loops like X10 either... Stuff like that... But I think its still a year or two out...
There are many companies such as Lugh Networks that currently provide the gear to use your house power wiring to create a "wireless" LAN.
Read a preview of my novel CYBERCHILD at www.smartalix.com/cyberchild
It's yet another application of AMR-Automatic meter reading. Not a new idea, with many companies developing many solutions.
A lot of information could be found on metering.com
Some of the players are:
oneline, Ambianet, Intellon, itran and many others.
Do they solve the problem of transmitting their signal through the transformers?
Among the companies solving the high rate data transmission over power lines (PLC technology) I know of
only one, Mainnet (www.mainnet-plc.com) that claims of going through the transformers. Others Ascom(www.ascom.ch), ONELINE(www.oneline.com) bypass them or use only the low voltage part of the power lines grid.
Actually that's being done already. Cisco IP phones receive power on the CAT5 ethernet connection they use to talk to the net. The switch provides the phone with a low-amp voltage enough to power a phone with LCD.
And of course standard PSTN phone lines use the same principle: they put 48V DC on the A-B lines and use it to power the phone's mike and earpiece. The AC 'data' signal is superimposed on the DC voltage with a transformer.
As the ITS Project Manager for a project including (among others) DCSI, the technology shouldn't impact small home systems. DCSI warps the power wave, this is not the same as the technology used in your home. However, it might cause enough "noise" to impact the home... Haven't seen any tests of that. It also doesn't lend itself to hacking. You could do it, but it would take a lot of work, some of it with 240 volts. Don't write off the old toaster. We're looking at technology that might be able to turn it off for you...