Slashdot Mirror
Networked Fridges 'Negotiate' Electricity Use
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."
My fridge better not negotiate its way out of cold beer at 7pm.
This won't be useful to many people. How many homes have more than one refrigerator? Not many I would think.
Is this really such a breakthrough? Any yokel with a router and a few boxes could set this up at home.
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.
I for one, welcome our ice cube dispensing overlords
Fridges are fairly low power devices with naturally random and uncorrelated cycling. One would think that in any given neighborhood, the normal randomness of the many fridges' cycling would be sufficient to result in a fairly level electrical "base load". I can't see that enforcing the levelness of this distribution could actually offer very much of a reduction in the peak load on the grid. What causes excessive peak loading is the coordinated use of many high-power loads. Typically this is air conditioning in the summer - all the units run simultaneously because it's hot outside, and each unit draws about 50 times more power than a fridge. Clothes dryers and washing machines in the evening also do this to a lesser extent. In the grand scheme of things, I really don't think there's much room for improvement through load-leveling of just fridges.
I am a geek attorney, but not your geek attorney unless you've already retained me. This is not legal advice.
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."
How about washing machines and dryers which page you when your laundry is done? Let's give every appliance a connection to the Internet!
Lab simulations have shown the technology is capable of supporting 10,000 or more networked units, but West said a commercial partner was needed to enable the CSIRO to conduct a larger scale, real-world trial.
Isn't 10,000 already a pretty large scale? I can't imagine very many real-world commercial entities using more than that in one location.
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 though. They'd keep us on IPv4 for another decade.
Bring it on. The power (savings) of a networked world. Bloody brilliant.
I had a similar idea, but more general.
nobody afraid of killer refrigerators?
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.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
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.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
So the routers, boxes running the algorithms, extra jacks, what not.. runs on what power exactly?
Sorry I think I will stick to my solar powered flashlight.
How does a post where it is clear that the poster didn't RTFA get modded insightful?
I, for one, welcome our new overlords.
I, for one, welcome our new fridge overlords!
This dawning time of the ruling fridges gives the term Ice Age a whole new meaning...
Power management of the kind described in the article belongs on a spacecraft or on a satellite.
It has no place in front of a terrestial outlet and because the "nicer" household appliances are
to the network, the more the power companies get away with letting their infrastructure rot.
And American power infrastructure is rotten as we have seen a single point of failure bring down
the power on the entire east coast. Compare that to Europe. When have you last heard that
all of western Europe was without power?
People buying applicances like this are doing themselves and the rest of us a disservice.
On top of that it is the consumers that pay for a feature out of their own pockets to increase
the profits of the power companies while allowing them to lower their service even further.
Doesn't sound like such a good deal now after you think about it, huh?
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.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I agree with you that the X10 is a very good industry standard (since 1975) for controlling electrical devices at home.
I just wish that among the X10 Limitations, they would have at least solved the encryption and addressing problem.
The standard X10 power line and RF protocols lack support for encryption, and can only address 256 devices. Unless filtered, power line signals from close neighbours using X10 may interfere with each other if the same device addresses are used by each party. Interfering RF wireless signals may similarly be received, with it being easy for anyone nearby with an X10 RF remote to wittingly or unwittingly cause mayhem if an RF to power line device is being used on a premises.
Of course, there are other standards existing too.
and so forth.
I, for one, welcome our new refrigerator overlords!
... we finally have an answer for the ages-old question of "why would I need an IP address for my fridge?" ... Not Talking Toasters though ...
What about toasts with pictures?
(Way to go, antifoidulus (807088)!)
This could really have been done better by putting up a small server at the power plant/windmill, from where the fridge regulators could fetch a message like "use more" or "use less", depending on the current power consumption.
The obvious advantage of simplicity aside, it would also mean more useful regulation, in that the fridges wouldn't just try to smooth out the the power draw from other other fridges, but instead try to balance the total draw at the plant.
I agree. The idea that the grid is fragile enough to require people to modify their usage patterns is dangerous. "All you can eat" energy is vital to our way of life.
Recently, I have read a number of stories in the same vain, and here I include things like distributing, without telling people, things that kill bot nets. Of course, if your fridge is talking to other peoples fridges, and so is you TV, shower and kettle, the possibility of breaches of privacy is there. On the other hand, there are clear benifits from doing so; as there are from killing the botnet and maybe from all this cloud computing stuff. As our technology starts to benifit from what might be considered a type of economy of scale through communicating with eachother, without our knowledge we move into the same lack of privacy a villager had when everyone in town knew everything about him or her. I genuinely wonder if it is worth it.
Merloni/Indesit, an Italian home appliances company, in 1999 launched the "Margherita Dialogic" washing machine, the first device to include the WRAP (Web Ready Appliances Protocol) technology.
The point of this is that all households in Italy (and I guess in many EU countries) have a 3KW usage limit, and if your demand gos over the limit the electricity meter will disconnect your house entirely.
Hence the need of a communicating protocol between home devices so that if you're using the electric oven and the AC, the fridge or the washing machine talks to them to coordinate a global demand that's below the 3KW threshold.
They also produced "adapters" for devices without their technology, so the smart devices could have a guess of the current electricity usage in the house (think of old devices or hairdryers for example).
I studied this case in an economy class I had. The discussion was focused on the big dilemma: open the technology (eg.:usage of the patents) to everybody to spread it out as much as possible or try to keep it proprietary to keep competitive advantage over competitors?
The only reference I found about it is:
http://www.indesitcompany.com/pages/en/finance/glossario.jsp
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.
Fridges as we know them are pretty sad contraptions with no shortage of room for improvement. 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.
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?
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
Fridges are fairly low power devices .......
no, fridges are not fairly low power devices that use quite alot of power .
fridges are heat pumps to pump all that heat you need a large amount of electricity if you could turn off the fridge for a few minutes a day you would save on power bills.
an example of power usage http://www.pmb.co.nz/power_usage.htm
now if you were a business and had say a large freezer and some refrigerated display cases and these devices were "smart" enough to turn themselves on and off at certain times of the day I bet you could save a large amount of money.
You might as well start with a spherical cow.
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.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
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.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
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.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
Is your refridgerator running linux?
"I'm a well-wisher, in that I don't wish you any specific harm."
Utilities would LOVE to invest in infrastructure, but the government doesn't even let them charge enough to operate with a profit, let alone enough of a profit to upgrade or even maintain existing infrastructure. Yay, regulation.
Look at the bright side, though. With CO2 limits and a virtual ban on coal, we won't have enough electricity available to overload our existing infrastructure, anyway.
There have been power control systems for quite a while to manage power consumption in factories that take things like total power draw and time of use into account. They're usually centralized instead of doing peer negotiation, though.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
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.
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
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!
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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
C - the footgun of programming languages
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.
The bottom line that any appliance tech will tell you is that:
a) Parts are impossible to get
b) It's less expensive to buy a new one than fix it.
c) The industry is so competitive that materials used are the cheapest available.
My thought is this: go ahead, add all the sexy bells, whistles and features that you want but, for God's sake, provide a Luddite default switch when all the high tech crap inevitably fails.
*** Don't be dull.***
My parents have a heating system that could really benefit from something like this. Their house was built in the early 1960s and has resistive heat elements in the ceilings. Each room can be controlled individually, and there are no cold spots anywhere in the house. But since there is no cooperation between the thermostats, they can have anywhere between zero and nine units operating simultaneously when the entire house is occupied.
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." -- George Orwell
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.
Will Wright (creator of the Sims and Spore) has a think tank called Stupid Fun Club, which has a fridge with a personality module that recognizes you by name and then gossips about you with the microwave. So, if you are mean to the fridge, then it will rat you out to the microwave, who will then burn your food. - BBC article (with a link to video. More about Stupid Fun Club (2007 Gadgetoff video).
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...
you had me at #!
n/t
you had me at #!
Mod parent up. It's an incredibly interesting article.
The main benefits of that chest freezer to (chest) refrigerator are its extra insulation, and its horizontal orientation that holds the cooled air rather than spilling it down and out of an open vertical door.
But horizontal orientation is a pain to use. I wonder whether orienting it vertically would work. To prevent the cold air pouring out, how about just a clear plastic door between each shelf, that keeps in the air except when that small door is briefly opened? If the door rolls up and under the shelf above it, the only air escaping is from that opened shelf, impeded by the smaller opening into which warmer room air can flow to replace the colder air escaping.
If a chest freezer can be flipped up vertically, I'd try it.
--
make install -not war
Why is it a paint to use? my family except for little kids use it just fine.
It only too a couple of days for everyone to be used to it. sliding baskets replace shelves.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Most people don't have energy efficiency as their #1, let alone only concern, when they're buying a fridge.
Maybe you don't, but I certainly have running costs foremost on my mind. I replaced a 20 year old refrigerator that was leaking energy like a sieve, and my electricity bills dropped by more than $100 a month. That's right, more than 50% of my electricity usage was going towards making food lukewarm.
Why "deliver" the concrete at all? Seems to me that the best bet is simply to wait until the fridge is there, go to Home Despot, buy a bag of quick mix, mix a batch, and pour it into the space where the crisper drawers are. Ideally line the whole area in saran wrap before closing it off so you can pull the concrete block out if you ever need to move the fridge, maybe even cast in a handle or two.
The fridge normally uses electricity to pump heat out of the fridge cabinet; the combined electrical and heat energy stays in your house and helps heat it.
This doesn't make the whole thing "efficient". Look at where that compressor is. Most of the heat it generates goes right up into the area you're trying to keep cold.
This is about as "efficient" as the Bush approach to "nationbuilding", i.e. "I spent lots of resources in about the right area so obviously I've accomplished a large productive result."
the government doesn't even let them charge enough to operate with a profit
bwahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha.
*wipes away tear*
Yep. Those poor, selfless, vulnerable power companies. Just getting by with no profits at all.
Because we know that government regulated service providers are run on a rigorous, cost-plus, highly transparent basis by gentle, honest monks who each get paid a nickel a year and seek only the greater good.
Like, say, Time-Warner. Or Enron.
Go back to FOX, you dittohead.
Get our power from any supplier, the fridges could shop for the best price on a daily or even hourly basis.
Seems to me like all the more reason to stop buying "refrigerators" and start just having big insulated boxes built in when we redo a kitchen or build a house. Look at the suggestions above. Heat exchanger linked with outside air and house HVAC. Big block of thermal mass inside. Networked controller. Chiller a bit off to the side. Add all this up and you'll get a much more robust result where even if the chiller or some other part breaks down, all that you do is replace it with another chiller (or whatever). And since that chiller is a separate component in its own little cabinet off to the side or even through the wall, it's no big deal if the new one is a different design. As long as it still provides that stream of cold air it can be made of nanomachinery-linked magic Fritos for all that your fridge will care.
You're right. Current appliances are cobbled together crap that's built of cheap parts, includes a shitty manual, and is a pain to repair or even modify. Why the hell do /.ers, of all people put up with this?
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
more than 50% of my electricity usage was going towards making food lukewarm.
Welcome to slashdot, Ronald McDonald.
http://www.earth.org.uk/note-on-dynamic-demand-value.html
Rgds
Damon
http://m.earth.org.uk/
http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=404030&cid=21888056
yea. we need smarter power..
of course, do we want to have every lamp have a full automator circuit? or still let kids build classic lamps in JR High?
Storm
Refrigerators based on laser refrigeration
That use practically no energy, so there's no scarcity or need for refrigerators to negotiate with each other.
In the grand scheme of things, I really don't think there's much room for improvement through load-leveling of just fridges.
Au Contraire - there is lots of room for improvement!
Electricity use follows a 24 hour cycle that typically peaks somewhere between 2 and 7 PM and hits a low point around 2-6 AM. And it's a pretty deep cycle: usage in the early hours of the day is dramatically lower than in the late afternoon! And this dramtic cycle continues because there's really no incentive to use less electricity in the afternoon or more in the early hours.
But if electricity was priced on an hourly basis, if the average price of money rose during the late afternoon and dropped to low points early in the morning, then people would have incentive to offset the "base load" with more dynamic energy usage patterns.
You could set your thermostat to two variables: preferred temperature and energy cost. If electricity is especially expensive, it could accept a warmer temperature (summer) or cooler temperature at significant savings to you. You may find that electric vehicles pay for themselves because electricity would be much cheaper during the hours they typically charge - at night.
And it wouldn't be difficult to implement - BPL taught us that while it's not feasible to transmit data over long distances via power lines, it's perfectly reasonable at low signal rates and distances - easily done within a household.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
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.
What's a basement?
Seriously, in many southern states, houses do not have basements. This is usually because of cost caused by the type of earth under the soil.
Without the 2nd Amendment, the others are just suggestions.
I would suggest that you look a bit more closely at when and why blackouts happen. While the headlines at CNN and USA Today may suggest that blackouts come from single failures, that is not the reality for anything bigger than a neighborhood. Cascades of problems caused by bad choices of logic and values in the equipment responsible for load balancing and redistribution may create a toxic synergy with failed substations of limited load powerlines, but even there you're talking about dozens of individual components failing.
As for the big east coast blackout, keep in mind that companies like Keystone/Con Ed have long since been found to have lied about what failed and when. There's a reason that the N Y City council had to convene hearings to try to get the relevant documents turned over and that merchants in neighborhoods like Astoria have been spending painful amounts of money on discovery efforts. Things are not as they were portrayed in the headlines. Especially since the power companies were delighted to have a chance to claim a "need" to eminent domain their way past all those pesky environmental laws and property rights they would need to violate to get big new power lines put in.
No, we've got plenty of problems with power generation, distribution, measurement, and sale but it's not anywhere near as bad as you say. At least not on the infrastructure front.